


For so many years have gone, though I'm older but a year

by BrooklynBugleBoy



Series: Hiraeth [1]
Category: Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018), Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018) RPF, Queen (Band)
Genre: (Eventual Comfort), :D, All the ballet stuff has a meaning, Asthma, Astronomy, Ballet, Beau's Guilt, Birthmarks, Blood, Daydreams, Death, Domestic Violence, F/M, Grief, Gruesome at times, HIV/AIDS, Homophobia, Hurt No Comfort, Kid has issues, London, Loss, Lost Love, M/M, Men Crying, Multi, New Orleans, Nightmares, Older Characters, Past Appendicitis Mentions, Past Child Abuse, Promise, Reincarnation, Sad, Slurs, Suicide Attempt, Voodoo, pure angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2019-09-16 10:36:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 46,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16952421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrooklynBugleBoy/pseuds/BrooklynBugleBoy
Summary: "Beau spied a familiar smile in that head of incorrigible snowy white curls. He knew that beautiful face once, before the lines took over, knew that body and those incongruous warm hands. Before age softened his middle and jawline and those liver spots stole the property of freckles on his skin. Beau knew that nose, those eyes, the quirk of those caterpillar eyebrows.For the first time in his life, nineteen-year-old Beau LaCroix looked into the face of Dr. Brian May: astrophysicist and former guitarist of Queen.For the first time in twenty-five years, Freddie Mercury looked into the face of the best-friend and lover he’d left behind.They just so happened to be one and the same."Freddie reincarnation AU. (A big thanks to @twostepsnearer and @squeerrelgirl on tumblr for helping me with my angst fest).





	1. For my life still ahead, pity me

**Author's Note:**

> Features Queen's '39. 
> 
> No idea why I wrote this and then decided to edit in the middle of finals. But here we are. There will be more and improvements to this when I'm no longer actively dying during finals. <3 
> 
> Note: None of this actually happened. Duh. :D

  
_“Don't you hear my call though you're many years away_  
_Don't you hear me calling you_  
_Write your letters in the sand_  
_For the day I take your hand_  
_In the land that our grandchildren knew…”_

 

Beauregard LaCroix walked out to meet-and-greet the guests after the second act, still dressed as _The Sugar Plum Fairy._

An oddly androgynous Sugar Plum Fairy.

It was the end of Nutcracker season, Hell-incarnate for the Royal Ballet. Beau was one of the only principal dancers not out on injury and _the show must go on_ , even if that meant trussing up a baby-faced androgynous boy like a pink sweets fairy and having him dance the _pas de deux_ with a pretty male soloist on pointe. Then so be it. _(It wasn’t desperation, they were just being ‘inclusive’.)_

Inclusive, his ass. Beau was just the youngest, smallest and the only male principal who could go up on pointe without it being a joke. Ergo, the only one who could easily pass for a girl with long blonde ringlets.

“ _The Sugar Plum Fairy?_ …From the _Land of Sweets_ , I presume?”

Beau turned with his stage persona mega-wattage smile already in place, expecting to see the children that the warm voice had been humoring. He wasn’t disappointed by the sight of an elderly man with two small children, a boy and a girl. Both at the age that made hiding behind trouser legs the perfect disguise.

He bent down with a little bow.

“Why yes, ’tis I! Who do I have the honor of speaking with?”

“I’m Alexander.” The little boy spoke softly, a thumb trying to inch its way back into his mouth. “She’s Freddie. This is our Grandpa.”

He was cut off by his sister with a, “Are you a real fairy? Like _Tinkerbell?”_

Beau had no qualms about nodding, allowing her to swipe some glitter from his cheeks, calling it fairy dust. She squinted at the back of his sparkly costume to see if she could see his wings, he told her they were invisible while he was tall. _(When he was Tinkerbell-sized, they were enormous.)_ She and Alexander were transfixed, believing every falsehood that came out of his mouth.

“Do fairies believe in space? My Grandpa studies it.” Alexander sounded so proud, as Beau assured him that oh yes, how else could fairies fly home to Neverland? They needed the second star to the right to guide them and the planets to mark their way.

When Beau raised his big blue eyes to look up at the beloved Grandpa in question, he spied a familiar smile in that head of incorrigible snowy white curls. He knew that beautiful face once, before the lines took over, knew that body and those incongruous warm hands. Before age softened his middle and jawline and those liver spots stole the property of freckles on his skin. Beau knew that nose, those eyes, the quirk of those caterpillar eyebrows.

For the first time in his life, nineteen-year-old Beau LaCroix looked into the face of Dr. Brian May: astrophysicist and former guitarist of Queen.

For the first time in twenty-five years, Freddie Mercury looked into the face of the best-friend and lover he’d left behind.

They just so happened to be one and the same.

  
-X-

  
Beau was a fussy baby.

His fathers’ had already raised up three rough-and-tumble little boys before him, yet their youngest was on a different level of difficulty. He was forever unhappy.

Not even the screaming sort of unhappy, they could’ve dealt with that. No, Beau’s was the kind of unhappy that left him sniffling and crying into his stuffed animals at night. As if he was forever looking around for someone or something that wasn’t there. It was a deep visceral sadness that clung to him.

Even after he grew into a sweet little boy with 3c blonde curls and fair skin, covered in so many big moles and birthmarks that the other kids in kindergarten called him a _dalmatian_ , the sadness stayed. He would run and play and laugh with his brothers, but there was always an aura of age around him. Wisdom and sadness that oozed from him beyond all else. Even when he was smiling, with that quirk of covering up his mouth with his hand, the smiles never reached his eyes.

It scared his poor fathers something awful, but what could they do?

Beau was just an _odd_ little boy.

A child with a man’s eyes. Who could lie on the carpet and color with fat wax crayons for hours on end. Drawing out snatches of beautiful scenery and people they’d never met, with skills not often attributed to children his age. They just assumed he was talented and imaginative.

He would vividly describe places that he had never been, like a lovely place in Switzerland called Montreux or a tiny studio in Munich, Germany. They just assumed those drawings and stories were the product of far too many hours of children’s programing. Beau couldn’t possibly be remembering a life he’d never lived. _(Even if he did wake up with these horrible night terrors, screaming about how he couldn’t breathe. Or his inability to be alone in the dark or in small confined spaces. Once his brothers zipped him up in a sleeping bag as a joke, the poor little boy was so shaken up afterwards that he didn’t speak coherently for days, just staring straight ahead and warbling in an odd language that none of them knew)._

The small family moved to New Orleans when Beau was six, it was where Adamien _(Beau’s Papa)_ had grown up, and where there was a big extended family waiting around every corner of the French Quarter.

Kit _(Adamien’s husband and Beau’s Daddy)_ had been apprehensive at first, but the boys seemed to enjoy the new haunts and change of scenery, all things seemed to be going to plan. Damie’s family could finally meet the kids and they could grow up as warm and loved as Damie had. In a beautiful, burgeoning multicultural society. _(Where the birthmarks and moles on Beau’s body were the least of everyone’s concerns)._

The kids: _Charlie_ , fifteen and far too smart for his own good, _Baptiste_ , thirteen and the family’s sensitive little peacemaker, _Henri_ , the then ten-year-old demon he was, and _Beau_ , six and as shy as could be, flourished like flowers reaching for the sun. Damie’s family enveloped the tiny clan with all the joy and acceptance in the world. An endless clutch of cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents charging into their lives with open arms.

The matriarch of their large loving family, Mama Delia, was a Voodoo Queen, one of the most well-known in New Orleans. She took one look at her youngest grandchild and understood.

“He remembers, poor _bébé_.” She crooned, Beau curled up in her lap asleep, as she rocked them back and forth in her creaky old patio rocking chair. Her grown son had simply looked confused. “What do you mean, Mama?”

“Those reborn never remember their pasts, maybe they keep a few quirks after a traumatic death, but your poor _bébé_ … he remembers all of his. He will have a very hard life, _mon chou_.” _A very hard life._

Little Beau slept on in her honeysuckle grip, flyaway curls falling in front of his closed pacific eyes. Dreaming of a life that ended a long time ago, a life that he never really forgot.

  
-X-

  
Beau screamed the first time he got into Kit’s record collection and happened to pick up Queen’s _News of the World_ album. Really and truly _screamed_.

The young father assumed it was because the robot on the front must have looked scary to those soft seven-year-old eyes.

But his poor tiny son was just sobbing his little heart out, running his fingers over the characters in the robot’s hands. Still dressed in his sweaty leotard from ballet class, tears smeared across his flushed pockmarked cheeks.

Kit gingerly scooped up his heartbroken little boy, pressing a halo of kisses into his youngest son’s sweat-dampened fairy blonde curls. “Oh, angel. It’s alright. Those are just the band members. That’s—“ He was about to list them, but Beau cut him off, softly.

“I know, Daddy. _Roggie_ ’s on the back, _Deaky_ ’s on the bottom of the front bit, but _me and Bri_ are still in the robot’s hand. _I died first_ …” His thumb rubbed over the cherry-red blood stain splattered across Freddie Mercury’s chest. Warm, fat tears fell and slid off the cardboard cover in rivulets.

Kit froze, eyes wide as his distraught son curled up into his neck.

“ _I miss them_ … Daddy, why did I have to die _first?_ ”

The eyes of a dead man looked up from his child’s round splotchy face and Kit felt his heart stutter in his chest.

  
-X-

  
When Beau sang, it felt like his heart was being ripped out of his chest.

It _hurt,_ in a way nothing had ever _hurt_ before.

Even the time he jumped off the school swing-set at Henri’s urging and broke his ankle.

When he sang, _(because of all the things to carry over to his next life, it would be his voice),_ the pain in his chest was worse than the normal sort of pain. It felt like he was being smothered with a handkerchief full of chloroform, having it shoved it down his throat to torch chemical burns down his esophagus. When he sang, his pacific-blue eyes closed and he was back to being fully himself again. He was back playing at the Rainbow in ’74. Twirling on stage at Live Aid in ’85. Looking to the side to see Deaky bopping about, brunet head tossed back with bliss.

Roger opening his mouth to let out that dog whistle pitch, a challenge that was only evident when they jammed together, him rutting and jiving with Roggie’s drum kit. Making the blonde imp laugh and mimic his frantic movements with equal gusto.

Then trusty Brian on Red, looking at him like he was something truly special. One of a kind. Their Freddie. _(He had never loved being anything more)._

It was always awful when he opened up his eyes again, to look in the mirror and see a lost little child with Shirley Temple pin curls and chipped black-lacquered fingernails on one hand, skin dotted in the dozens of birthmarks and moles he hated. A mockery of the man he used to be.

Who was he supposed to be now?

His first life was over.

And his second was only a pale imitation.

  
-X-

  
He remembered his own death.

  
-X-

  
He studied cosmology and astronomy for Brian.

It sounded silly, he knew.

But there was just something about looking up into the sky and seeing all those stars beam back down at him, that made him feel anchored to this new life. Freddie Mercury had never had a head for numbers. So Beau didn’t either, but he still remembered Brian taking them out with a shitty telescope at Ridge Farm as he was writing that space song of his.

Whenever Beau struggled, whenever it all felt too much. That was what he remembered, what he used to guide him. His _polaris._

He heard Brian’s warm soft-spoken voice in his head. Thick and creamy as pancake batter, the ones his Papa could make from scratch.

_‘That’s Argo Navis. It’s Jason’s ship, the one from Greek mythology.’_

He had hummed, curling into Brian’s bicep and holding on like a limpet. _‘Jason and the Argonauts’._ Yes, he knew about mythology, even back then. _(He had named himself Mercury for the god, after all)._

There was an asteroid named after him.

_17473 Freddiemercury._

He’d cried when he found out. Cried until he was blue in the face and drowning in his own body all over again. _Oh Maggie, why?_

_When all I ever did was ruin your life?_

_Darling, I can never apologize enough for what I did to you._

_To everyone I ever said I loved._

  
_-_ X-

  
Once he had a spot at the Royal Ballet, he started visiting Jim’s grave quite frequently.

Leaving little parcels and trinkets behind, flowers too. All his husband’s favorites. He never allowed himself to stay too long. He wouldn’t sully his husband’s grave with his presence, not the way he had once sullied his life.

He knew what Jim would say to such thoughts. His sweet, long-suffering Jim, who had always accepted his every idiosyncrasy and oddity. His every mistake. Including the one that he’d bloody passed on.

_‘Freddie, love, stop. You didn’t know, there’s nothing you could have done. I had a long, happy life. Go out, live your own.’_

As if he wasn’t in purgatory.

As if this wasn’t a new form of Hell.

Living in a world that remembered him. With his friends getting on in age, Brian and Roger were still touring, the two old queens still rocking away. But they didn’t know him with this face, this body. He was a stranger. And if he told them? If he tracked them down and bared his soul like a lamb to the slaughter? They would never believe. He would simply hurt them in an entirely new way this time. And it would be all his selfishness to blame. Just the same as the first time.

His sister was still alive, with babies and grand-babies of her very own, his little Kash. He ached to hold her in his arms again, just one more time, but he knew such dreams were lost on the wings of butterflies. Lost to the sands of time. Just as he should have been. Oh, how he wished he’d just stayed dead.

It was better than continuing on as he was.

John, oh _Deaky_. _(Did he even deserve to use that name anymore, after all he’d done?)_

He had stolen Deaky’s passion. The thrum of a bass had been in that boy’s devil heart long before Freddie, long before Queen. But with his loss, the world had lost the sound of John Deacon’s fabulous strumming heart. And Freddie would never forgive himself. Beau would never forgive himself.

Sometimes he wondered where Freddie stopped and Beau was meant to begin.

  
-X-

  
He tried to kill himself once. _(Well, he’d thought about it)._

He was going to do it too.

Didn’t see a point anymore, living a shade of another life.

Stared at that bottle of pills until the long scientific name blurred in front of his eyes. _(Roger would have known what it was, Roggie, his Rog. Beau had watched those interviews, the ones about how Rog had been driving, almost there. Poor Phoebe had broken the news to him behind the wheel of a car. …Roger breaking down every time he talked about it)._

Beau didn’t do it.

This life was his penance.

He deserved to _hurt._

Just like he’d hurt them.

  
-X-

  
Brian came back again, to the Ballet.

Just as Beau was finishing up a performance of _Swan Lake,_ still dressed as Odile. _The Black Swan_. Yet another female character he’d found himself playing. Dressed in all black garb, a feathered tunic that flared out at the bottom, black nails on one hand _(his own constant addition),_ and a pair of dying black pointe shoes that he’d torn to pieces. His dark gnarled crown crested above his curls and he was allowed to wear his spots without the makeup he so often used to cover them. He felt _naked._

Even more so when he found Brian waiting for him.

“Hello, Sugar Plum Fairy. Or shall I say _Odile? Mr. Black Swan?_ ”

“ _Beau_ is fine. Beauregard LaCroix.” _Freddie. Brian, it’s me_. “I suppose we didn’t have a proper introduction last time, Dr. May?”

“You know my name?” Honestly surprised. _Humble Bri._ Beau made sure to pour more New Orleans into his words, careful to not slip into the British intonation he'd always preferred.

“Doesn’t everyone? Where are the children?” His eyes searched out the familiar round faces. Yet couldn’t locate them in the crowd. A flush climbed those lined cheeks he once knew so well. _Oh._

“I came alone, actually.”

“Ah. Well, why wouldn’t you? I’m quite the show stopper, if I do say so myself.” A put-upon showman’s grin twitching to life on his painted lips. “But dear, I can get you free tickets. You needn’t go broke trying to see me. In fact, would you like my number? Maybe we can have coffee sometime.”

 _What are you doing?_ The voice in his head screamed. _He isn’t yours anymore._

Brian’s smile was like a breath of fresh air. Oh how he’d missed that lovely smile.

“I’d like that very much.”

  
-X-

  
“ _For the earth is old and grey, little darling we'll away_  
_But my love this cannot be_  
_For so many years have gone though I'm older but a year_  
_Your mother's eyes from your eyes cry to me…”_

 


	2. A thin moon me in a smoke-screen sky

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Features These Are The Days of Our Lives, Now I'm Here, Too Much Love Will Kill You and Love of my Life by Queen. 
> 
> :D
> 
> Also I rediscovered the video of Brian singing Too Much Love Will Kill You on my Youtube feed. Ouch, dude. 
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNa5kRX45tg

“ _A baby I was when you took my hand_  
_The light of the night burned bright_  
_The people all stared didn't understand_  
_But you knew my name on sight.”_

  
Beau remembered when fancy _Climpson’s Coffee Bar_ was a dinky little market stall, it used to be one of their favorite haunts as poor boys.

It may sound a strange thing to remember, a lot of his clearest memories were, but he still knew all of their favorite orders from the stall.

Roger liked his tea with a half a bottle of vanilla extract dumped in and a dash of lemon to cut the sweetness, same for his coffee. John liked his as black as his soul, _(Freddie always used to dash a hint of milk in there anyway, it used to make Deaky smile)._ Brian would always order plain tea or black coffee because he wanted to look sophisticated.

But as they sat down at a table a few paces away from the bar, Beau passed him a paper cup of full of steaming tea with milk, sugar, cinnamon and vanilla extract. (Just how he knew he secretly liked it, some things didn’t change with the years). Like the way Bri practically lit up when he tasted it, with an appreciative hum. All of a sudden, it was like the years melted away from Brian’s face. For an instant, he saw his _Brimi. His Maggie._ The one he had called his Jimi Hendrix. _Oh. So that’s where you’ve been hiding, you old sod. I just have to keep surprising you._

“How did you know I like my tea with…?”

“Doesn’t everybody?” Beau shrugged with a smile. “Life’s too short to be boring, _old lady.”_

He watched Bri choke, with a delighted smile on his face.

“ _Old lady?”_ He sounded more than a little shocked and Beau couldn’t help but giggle like some sort of vapid schoolgirl.

“Why, of course! It seems those hair curlers did their job.” He reached over to _boing_ one of Brian’s front curls in a way he knew he hated. “Do you have the kind you sleep in or the hot rollers for the morning?”

“Why you _little…!”_ Brian obviously tried to be angry, at first, but the happiness was clear in the way the corners of his mouth twitched. “You’ve got no room to talk with curls worse than mine, _baby boy_.” Reaching over to _thwap_ one of Beau’s front ones with a gentle hand. Yet making him squawk like the peacock he was at heart, all the same.

It must have seemed the oddest friendship to everyone around them.

But you see, Beau didn’t _care._

He ignored the tiny voice in his head telling him to _let go_.

For the first time in this life, he had a reason to _hold on._

  
-X-

  
His Dads adopted Charlie from Hong Kong at two years old. He had sobbed when placed into their arms, screaming in Mandarin for his mother.

Baptiste, came from a tiny hole-in-the-wall orphanage in France, at five. He had run straight to them, crying how much he loved them in lilting broken English.

Henri was from a surrogate with Kit’s sperm, he was meant to be their last. They were there the day he was born and sobbed in each others arms, him held between them like a promise.

But it all changed when they stumbled across a picture of a tiny orphaned baby called Anastazy, in a cluttered Siberian orphanage. Soon that small baby boy would be called Beau. When he was placed in their arms, he had wept for another’s.

  
-X-

  
Directly after one of his performances, he snatched up a waiting Bri by the hand and dragged him out on the balcony past the bar on the second floor of the _Royal Opera House._

It was the clearest night he could remember for months and he was so bloody excited, he was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet. Even through the pointe shoes and the blood that was undoubtably soaking into the sides from burst blisters.

“It’s splendid, Bri! Look at how clear _the twins_ are!”

 _Gemini. Castor and Pollux_ , the two brothers in the sky in Greek mythology. Also the names of the constellation’s two brightest stars. Holding onto each other, forever.

Brian laughed, tying back his curls so he could see better and doing the same to Beau’s with a spare lemon-yellow scrunchie. “Have you ever seen a _Geminids_ meteor shower? They happen every December.” Beau slowly shook his head and the smile grew on Brian’s lips. A big smile, not one of those tiny ones he would flash to the cameras. A _real_ smile. One that he used to give Freddie all the time.

“We should see one together then. In the countryside where you can see it best.”

Beau tugged a long white ciggie out of his pack and lit up between his lips. Watching the smoke curl up to the heavens. Where he should've been. He was careful not to offer one to Bri. The old man didn’t smoke, never had, but Beau was certainly not going to offer one. Just in case. Brian’s mortality was all too apparent already.

The older man was aghast however, at the mere sight of the cancer-stick between Beau’s lips and practically ripped it away, flicking it off into the night. His environmentally-conscious Bri, had just blatantly littered for Beau’s sake. The ciggie made a small popping noise when it left his mouth. And he couldn’t even bring himself to scowl. Too surprised by the action.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing? Those things will _kill_ you!”

Brian, who had lost too many friends to the ravages of those damn things. His own father had been stolen away at the same time Freddie had. Obviously seeing a bright young boy with such a curse between his lips had been jarring, unacceptable. Beau had never seen Brian so mad in this life. But because being a little shit was all he’d ever been good at. He tugged out another one, pointedly.

“That’s the point, darling.” He mumbled around it, searching for his lighter.

The lighter Brian was now twirling between his fingers, an unreadable expression on his face.

“Hey! Give that back!” The boy lunged but didn’t fight for it, far too stunned. Brian slowly tugged up the sleeve on his right arm, instead of handing back the plastic thing. Exposing the naked wrist there for Beau to see, there was usually an old watch there, if the sleeve was raised at all.

“That’s never the right answer, Beau, believe me.”

Amid all the salt and pepper arm hair, far more salt than pepper, was a fat white scar.

An unmistakable fat white scar, that had once undoubtably been red, angry, and knotted. The place where blood loss had almost stolen one of the loves of his life.

Freddie couldn’t breathe again.

“You…” His heart was beating inside his throat like the wings of a hummingbird. A butterfly. “You tried to…?” _Oh God, no. Brimi, no. I didn’t… Did I? Fuck._

It took all the willpower he had not to scream _bullshit_ at the sky, because it just wasn’t fair. He couldn’t have been the one to break Brian. Sweet, stalwart Brian who wore his heart on his lapels and who could smile while sobbing, a feat not many could manage. _No. No. Why?_

Beau didn’t realize he was crying until he saw the stricken look on Brian’s face. “Oh, shit. No, love, don’t cry.” The sleeve was instantly yanked back down, as if out of sight, out of mind. “It was a long time ago.” As if that somehow made it better, made it _okay_. “I’m much better now.”

He was suddenly hugging the ever-living daylights out of that old man, long before he registered what was happening. Because that old man was Brian. His Brimi. His Bri.

All clumsy gestures and too-long limbs, and that low swirling-whirling voice that reminded him of mixing milk into tea with a silver spoon, a voice that fell like maple syrup out of a glass bottle or the ocean on a calm day. He used to play in the ocean with Kash, when they were very small, living in Zanzibar. His eyes reflected the color of the sea now, a whisper of the homeland he’d lost.

“Bri, I’m _so_ sorry.”

The years reaching out like fingers between them.

He closed his eyes and they were young men again. _Boys_. Back when he’d thought singing in a parking lot was going to convince Roger and Brian of his talents. When they’d thought recording in the dead of night and trying to make new sounds with coins and lampshades and bobbles was going to make them famous.

Brian’s surprisingly strong arms curled up and held him tight.

“It’s okay, Beau. It wasn’t your fault.” A little huff of a laugh, as if Brian thought his being so upset was almost laughable. A crying child who hadn’t been the one to cause him such anguish.

 _Your_ fault.

_Oh Bri, if you only knew._

  
_-_ X-

  
His Grandmére was a _Voodoo Queen,_ she was the one his neighbors called upon when there was a new baby born, a death, a serious illness, or tremulous struggle in their own lives. She always knew things. Saw the world in a way no one else did. She looked at him and told him _her_ truth.

“I know who you are.” She whispered into his curls. “There is a reason you remember, _bébé_. Let that reason guide you.”

In Voodoo, only souls who had done wrong or made mistakes were reincarnated as humans again, they got a reset, another go. “This is your chance to make things right. There is a reason for everything in this world, _bébé_. There is a reason for **_you_**.”

So he told her _his._

“I don’t know who I am anymore… Why couldn’t I have just forgotten? Like all the others?”

She simply kissed his spotted forehead, as if willing the bad thoughts away. “It is part of the plan. Your _guide_.” Taking his soft dappled hands in her own dark gnarled ones.

There was _always_ a reason.

  
-X-

  
Freddie had been fucked thoroughly.

Those early years had been an endless parade of cold nights spent huddled together under the covers of scratchy hotel sheets. Wandering hands and naughty looks shared across ‘official’ band meetings.

Before the wives, before the drama, before his endless stream of wrong-men and the one who had been far too good for him.

There had been Brian—with that long endless scar across his belly that he was so self-conscious about, Freddie hated it for an entirely different reason rather than ugliness, the proof of how close they’d come to losing him on that American tour— Roger— who had given a lusty glance to everything that moved and yet would still climb in with them at night, tucking a head of blonde tufty hair under his chin, tickling Freddie’s nose with the strands— and John—adorable Deaky with his cute boppity dance moves that never made any sort of sense but were charming anyway and that delicate baby-face, God he was so _young_ then, they all were.

When asked about his first love, he’d say music, _Mary_.

The truth was he had _three._

Three messy boys in the back of a shitty van, off to make a debut album they couldn’t afford.

Beau was a sexually-stunted virgin, who talked a big game but could never go through with it.

He would close his eyes, feel his body move in the harmony it craved with another’s and suddenly, he was sick again. Those marks across his skin were suddenly virulent and he could feel himself rotting away. A whole generation lost. Unfair didn’t even come close to covering it. His body may have been supple, young, healthy and hale again as he scrambled away from his bed partner.

But in his mind, he was a corpse, that image of himself in the throes of his illness branded across his eyelids in a way he would never be able to shake.

His partner would look at him with wide eyes, mussed hair and flushed cheeks.

“You’re a fucking prude! If you weren’t going to put-out, then don’t tease like that, asshole!”

Leaving with a slam of the door.

Leaving Beau to curl up in the bathtub, crying into the porcelain.

_(He’d never understood the concept of measuring out bubble-bath, even when he was sick, he used to play around in the overfilled tub, giving himself bubbly afros and beards. Singing show-tunes and laughing)._

He had found a home in the Ballet world after all this time, a world rocked by the crisis. The same way the music community had been. He would walk into dance classes each day and see a wall of mourning for those who had lost their lives to the disease.

Those who had danced or even worked for the Royal Ballet in the past, those who were gone now, _(he was so unspeakably overjoyed to scan the names and not see **Peter Freestone** carved there, he’d been too scared to look at first)._

_Oh Phoebe, this was your world long before it was mine._

His new life was an echo of his old one.

Still dancing on a stage. Still marked by the red ribbon yoked around his neck. Spinning around and around like the tendrils of fire curling up from a phoenix, a firebird.

Reborn.

  
-X-

  
The girls in the company teased him, asking about his _Silver Fox_.

Beau would just roll his eyes as he did up his liner.

“It’s not like that, we’re just friends. He’s married with kids, grand-kids even.”

Yvette, one of the senior corp dancers had given him a sad and pensive look through her long red lashes. “He looks at you like you’re _someone else_. Be careful, _cherie._ ” A kiss on his cheek as she whispered in his ear.

  
-X-

  
Beau scooped up the fuzzy little fox baby like it was the most precious thing he’d ever held.

The adorable little tiny kit was part of an abandoned litter that Brian was taking care of in his backyard sanctuary. All the kits clumsily stumbled over as soon as they smelt both Beau and the fresh bottle, wriggling up and into his lap like little bundles of hairy delight. He was overjoyed. Working the rubber nipple into their teeny tiny mouths under Bri’s careful instructions.

The fluffy-haired guitarist was watching him with that look on his face again. The one that Beau couldn’t seem to name. The curly-haired blonde was too busy warbling at the darling little babies, kissing at them and rubbing tender fingers into their soft tufty red and gray fuzz. The babies were clambering up and over each other, desperate for his attention and he preened at such a response.

“They really like you.” Bri couldn’t hide the smile in his voice. Beau didn’t need to look up to see it, he already knew it was there. He could hear it in his voice.

“Who wouldn’t, darling? I’ve always had a way with animals.” Deja vu without him realizing it. Sometimes it felt like the animals saw him and understood that he was different. Or perhaps it was one of his past talents carrying over into his new life. There was a reason he’d always had so many cats, in every incarnation.

Brian had asked about it once. When every stray kitten or cat in a five mile radius would run over and make its new home in Freddie’s lap.

_‘They really like you.’ Bri had laughed. Freddie had simply rolled his warm eyes, flashing a grin that exposed his prominent teeth, he was with his family after all, his boys. There was no judgement there._

_‘Who wouldn’t, darling? I’ve always had a way with animals.’_

Brian opened and closed his mouth, silver curls obscuring his eyes, searching for the words.

“Beau?” The blonde didn’t look up, too busy kissing at a little kit that had edged too close. “ _Beau?”_ Something had changed in his voice, a something that had the blonde raising his head, expressing his confusion with a low absentminded hum.

Bri was gnawing at his bottom lip, as if unable to verbalize what he had to say. “Do you believe in…” He trailed off.

“Believe in _what,_ Bri?”

Crystalline pacific blue eyes blinked and the old man just shook his head.

“Nothing.” A sad little smile. “Nothing at all.”

He was crying, his shoulders trembling with the force of it, and Beau was instantly throwing his arms around the living-breathing man who still meant so very much to him. Holding him close as if to block out all the pain of the world. “Why are you crying, darling? Is it something I did?”

“No, _Fr…. love_. Just being a sad old man, I suppose.”

  
-X-

  
The three older LaCroix brothers knew something was off about their youngest.

But that was just what made Beau, _Beau_ , his ability to be totally unexpected with all those quirks and odd little habits of his. He was always scribbling something away in a dream journal or petering about on the piano in the living room. Or perhaps roping their Dads into an impromptu sock dance on the tiled linoleum. Beau had this way of making people smile, of including everyone into his games or drawings or stories.

If let wild into a room of fellow children, Beau would run straight to the misfits at the back of the room. The kids who were never otherwise included. It didn’t make him popular by any means, but it made him loved. That was another thing about their baby brother. He loved to be loved.

Every time one of them left the house to do something, Beau would run down the stairs or from a completely opposite part of the house to careen into their arms, with all the trust in the world of being caught in the end and a big wet kiss on the cheek.

“I love you!” He’d crow with that devil-may-care smile of his, completely bewitching all around him.

He was a charming little boy, with an air of melancholy around him that they learned to deal with over time. Beau and his moods. He never threw tantrums or anything of the sort, but there would always be moments where he needed to be alone. Sitting quietly and looking off into the distance, into a world only he knew. Sometimes he’d cry.

They weren’t welcome to comfort him during those times. Even when not doing so made them feel like failures of big brothers. He never allowed them that close during the moods.

Soon he’d be clumsy delighted little Beau again, attracting every animal in the neighborhood like a Disney Princess with his make-believe ditties as they walked to school in a little procession each day. Spinning around and around in his pale pink ballet flats until he got dizzy and fell on his bum, giggling like mad. Their Beau.

Who laughed when he got picked on.

Who cried when he got unexpectedly hugged.

Their oddball baby brother who they wouldn’t have traded for the world.

They almost lost him at eleven.

Appendicitis that went untreated for so long that it almost killed him.

Beau did not do sickness well. Or even sickness period. The very idea horrified him, brought back memories of another time and another place, so he purposely ignored his symptoms until his swollen appendix burst like an overfilled water-balloon and his entire stomach cavity was abscessed and diseased with peritonitis. He didn’t leave the hospital for a month. He was in a medically induced coma for three days. The longest three days of their lives.

Dad didn’t leave his bedside once, bent over their tiny brother like he was sitting vigil.

Papa pretended to be okay, to go through the motions, but they saw through him like a stained glass window. Never quite sitting right.

When he started to come out of it, his fever was still sky-high and all he did was cry and cry. The silent brokenhearted type of crying that Beau was so known for. Everything about the three of them seemed to set him off. Baptiste, he called Deaky, in the most desperate sort of whisper. Like he was seeing a ghost in front of him. One about to condemn him for all he’d done. He confessed his sins, called Charlie and Henri, Brian and Roger. Told them how sorry he was, that he was a rotten person for dying on them the way he had. How he would never ever forgive himself for all he’d done.

He talked about so many things.

Little things like how he missed his mother, father and sister. About the man he’d once called his husband, talking about a set of flowers with a pretty note that he’d left outside in the hallway once because he’d been upset like a foolish little boy, about something he couldn’t remember. He cried for cats who were no longer there. Their own cats, Mango and Julius, had been pacing about, abundantly confused.

If they’d had any doubts of the validity of Beau’s past life, those were assuaged during numerous fever-addled nights.

Where their baby brother asked in the most broken of voices to just go home.

And they knew he wasn’t talking about their place in New Orleans or even Russia.

Charlemagne LaCroix, often called _Charlie_ by his siblings, went home and researched.

He did the thing that he, as the oldest, had been putting off for years.

And surrounded by images of the man his brother used to be, he broke down in tears. His baby brother, their Beau, had once been someone else. He would never really be theirs.

He would always belong, in some part, to the men he’d loved and lost.

And Charlie would _never_ forgive them for it.

  
-X-

  
“ _I'm just the shadow of the man I used to be_  
_And it seems like there's no way out of this for me_  
_I used to bring you sunshine_  
_Now all I ever do is bring you down_  
_Oh, how would it be if you were standing in my shoes_  
_Can't you see that it's impossible to choose…”_

  
_-X-_

  
Brian handed him the tickets with the brightest smile on his face.

“Payback for all the free Ballet.”

Tickets and a backstage pass to a _Queen + Adam Lambert_ concert.

Beau felt sick and rather tempted to vomit off the side of the park bench they were sitting on, but he forced a smile anyway, through the tears that threatened to spill from his eyes.

“I’ll be there, Bri.”

_For you, I’d do anything, Maggie._

And he did.

He went and watched the concert with ash on his tongue and embers of what was once a raging fire burning lowly in his chest.

Adam wasn’t him and that was okay. _(He didn’t know what he’d do if they’d truly replaced him)._

Because that boy had done the _impossible_. Gotten Brian and Roger doing what he’d always wanted for them, they were performing still. They were still up there having the times of their lives. He could barely see Rog through all the fake smoke, but still, just knowing that he was in the same place as two of his old lovers, his bandmates, his best-friends, was enough to make him sob into his leather jacket. Disguising it as a wave during Bohemian Rhapsody. Hearing another man sing his song, a song so raw and painful to him and, thankfully do it justice, it didn’t hurt the way he’d thought it would.

Watching his face on the jumbo-tron behind the stage was.

His old face. Him as a young tart, him in the days where he’d had to grow a beard to hide the Kaposi's Sarcoma on his jawline, him playing with a toy in Japan, him climbing to Roger’s lap simply because he could. It felt like doing a dozen pirouettes in a row. Over and over and over until you lost your spotting point. Until the word became a blur.

Although he did find himself snickering like a naughty little boy at Brian’s shiny silver batwing costume though. Glam. Very similar to the white one he himself had forced over that curly head back in ’75.

_‘The zipper’s suck!’ Bri had screeched. As Freddie had worked his hands underneath the mess of hair, pushing their bodies together for purchase. ‘That’s why I’m trying to save you, darling!’ He’d laughed._

So there he was again, laughing through his tears.

But watching Roger come to the front of the stage to the sound of bongo-drums. No. _No._ His heart broke in two down the same fault-lines. Salt rubbed into an open weeping wound that had never healed properly. His boys. His boys up there singing to him. Playing a video of him in the background. Little Rufus Taylor on drums. Little Rufus who he had only seen as a tiny baby. Little Rufus who was all grown up now and playing on his Dad’s kit.

_God, I missed everything, didn’t I?_

_“Those were the days of our lives, yeah_  
_The bad things in life were so few_  
_Those days are all gone now but one thing's still true_  
_When I look and I find, I still love you_  
_I still love you…”_

_His own last words on camera, frail and barely able to do more than stand up. The way his boys had looked at him, like his every breath was another one closer to the end._

He could scarcely see the stage through his tears and he ran out of there like a bat out of hell. Beating his way through the angry pulsating crowd and flashing his bloody pass to get backstage. Hounded by the sounds of bittersweet memories turned nauseating. He fell in front of an empty toilet and lost the contents of his stomach quite vehemently, vomit and yellowish bile dripping into the bowl by what felt like the gallon. Brian was singing now, he could hear it from the stall. _Love Of My Life._

_Their song._

The one he had written for those three lovely boys curled up against him in the back of a sweaty tour-bus and that the world had assumed was for Mary.

Then he heard his own voice through the playback.

And more acidic, acrid, burning vomit joined the pint that already swirled in the bowl. Mixing with his tears and the rusted tangy blood from the nosebleed that the force of his heaves had drawn out of him.

“ _You will remember_  
_When this is blown over_  
_Everything's all by the way_  
_When I grow older_  
_I will be there at your side to remind you_  
_How I still love you…”_

How had he known? Even then, what his life would become?

Clumps of thin scratchy toilet paper held up to his nose as he cried with no end in sight. His life was spread in shattered pieces across the floor. Both lives in fragments and he was incapable of fixing it again. Who was he meant to be? If being who he used to be meant forgetting his Dads and big brothers? If fully accepting his identity as Beau LaCroix meant the loss of Freddie Mercury? _Who was he?_

This was why he’d stared at that bottle of pills so long ago.

Why it had seemed like his only way out.

Why it still did.

He stumbled out of that stall like the old man he was, breathing hard and trembling. Staggering towards the band’s dressing room, where he’d promised to meet Bri after the show. He wasn’t expecting to run directly into a soft chest or for a pair of strong tattooed arms to steady him.

“Hey _kid,_ had too much to drink?” A gruff chuckle, but hands that were exceedingly gentle.

Beau looked up to see the face of _his best-friend._

Roger was a fair bit bigger now, older and with a tiredness about him that he’d never possessed before, his hair turned wispy white instead of tufty blonde, but his eyes still danced with the same sort of muted humor. His smile was still mischievous and his hands strong and calloused. Beau knew those hands, those drumstick twirling fingers. He knew Roger’s body better than he knew his own. He ached to trace those tattoos. Most were new, he wanted to know what they meant.

Those blue eyes locked in on his.

Looking at him with the same sort of concern that he remembered far too well.

_Roger crying into Freddie's weak arms, too weak to properly hold the blonde anymore. He’d thought he would always be able to do that. To always hold Roggie close and kiss away his hurts. How his chest had hurt, burned and bled. How all of it had been so ruinous. Not just his illness on his body, but for what it did to his family, to the people he loved the most in the world._

_‘Do you have to go?’_

_Roger had whispered into their shared pillow, the drummer was breathing deeply, as if trying to capture the last of the scent. Freddie had spent weeks pussyfooting around the issue, trying to deny the inevitable. But in that moment, he broke. He brushed his lips against Roger’s for the first time in a decade._

_‘I will never leave you, Roggie. I will always be with you.’ He’d thought of the phoenix on their crest. The inexplicable phoenix. ‘In this life or another.’_

Beau LaCroix blinked up at Roger Taylor and couldn’t help but smile as the tears rolled down his splotchy cheeks.

_I’m here, Roggie. I came back, just like I promised._

“I’m looking for Brian actually, have you seen him?”

  
-X-

“ _A thin moon me in a smoke-screen sky_  
_Where the beams of your lovelight chase_  
_Don't move, don't speak, don't feel no pain_  
_With a rain running down my face_

 _Your matches still light up the sky_  
_And many a tear lives on in my eye…”_

 


	3. On the Streets of Philadelphia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Big shoutout and thanks to the lovely @chaoskirin on tumblr for everything and who drew this lovely rendition of Beau!
> 
> https://waywardrunawaycherryblossom.tumblr.com/post/181158753261/chaoskirin-i-tried-to-draw-beau-from#notes
> 
> As well as @theoddowldoodle who did one as well! 
> 
> https://theoddowldoodle.tumblr.com/post/181188107968/tried-to-draw-waywardrunawaycherryblossom-s#notes
> 
> (Oh lord I was touched by the art wizards. Two beautiful, amazing and talented artists who managed to create something beautiful from the mess I saw in my head). <3333
> 
> And to my YouTube suggestion of Philadelphia. The movie that always makes me sob like a baby. 
> 
> The song featured is Streets of Philadelphia by Bruce Springsteen, the opening song to that movie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enjoy!! :DDD

“ _I was bruised and battered, I couldn't tell what I felt_  
_I was unrecognizable to myself_  
_I saw my reflection in a window, I didn't know my own face_  
_Oh brother are you gonna leave me wastin' away_

 _On the Streets of Philadelphia_ …”

 

  
Baptiste climbed into bed with his sleepy little brother after yet another tearful nightmare.

Beau was always at his most honest when he was sleepy, when he didn't have to prove anything to anyone. When he was just Beau and all that meant for everyone around him, before or after this new extraordinary life of his.

The tiny boy curled against Baptiste’s narrow pigeon chest naturally, and the older boy’s arms curled up to hold him there. Blonde corkscrew curls made his cheeks itch and yet he only held on tighter. As if afraid his brother was going to fall through his hands like sand in an hourglass. Dried tear-tracks made Beau’s face stick to Baptiste’s cotton nightshirt no matter how much he wriggled around to free it, or peppered his baby brother’s forehead with kisses, the only place he could reach. Some small modicum of comfort above all else.

_I couldn’t protect you in that life, little brother._

_But you’d better damn well believe, that I’m protecting you in this one._

“It wasn’t your fault, you know that, don’t you?” He whispered like his sleeping little brother could actually hear him. Fingers carding through his messy sweat-tinged ringlets. “Everything that happened, _it wasn’t your fault._ ”

If only Beau could hear him and understand somehow. Perhaps he could imbue it into the younger’s mind like playing Baby Mozart. It wasn’t like Beau ever listened when awake anyway.

A curious Mango would trill and work her fat furry body in between them, purring up a storm and making Beau smile in his sleep, weaving his little fingers into her fur. “ _Delilah…_ ”

  
-X-

 

“ _I walked the avenue, 'til my legs felt like stone_

 _I heard the voices of friends vanished and gone_  
_At night I could hear the blood in my veins_  
_Just as black and whispering as the rain_

_On the Streets of Philadelphia…”_

 

-X-

  
They went to _Pride_ parades as a family.

Had every year for as long as Beau could remember.

Riding high on his Dad’s shoulders to watch the world grow ever more colorful by the second. A blanket of belonging wrapping him up safe and warm. Flickers of acceptance. Of hope.

Where he could stretch out his arms, close his eyes, and just be.

A multicolored bird about to take flight. _(He remembered wearing taffeta wings once, confetti spiraling off in every color imaginable. Rog had said he looked like a deranged parrot.)._

Baptiste and Henri danced hand-in-hand on the glittering pavement. Charlie was waving his four different flags like a human rainbow. Each of them wearing a shirt that proclaimed to the world. _I Love My Daddies. My Family Is Beautiful._

_Loving._

_Perfect._

Of course, where there was love, there was always hate.

Bigots behind a chain-link fence, preaching about how his family was wrong and disgusting. How everyone who marched beside them was supposedly damned, doomed to an afterlife of eternal hellfire.

Beau would smile and wave like a princess on parade, blowing kisses at the angry teeming crowd, wholly unashamed. Of all the mistakes he’d made in both his lives, being the son of Kit and Adamien LaCroix was not one of them.

“I’m so sorry you boys had to hear all that.” His Papa apologized once, holding all four of them within his arms that seemed to go on forever.

Charlie had grumbled something about beating them up, warring on the world as always. _(Beau worried for his big brother sometimes, born a soldier without a war. Charlie was the kind of boy to bring a knife to a brutal gunfight…and win)._  While Baptiste had been fervently asking if their Dads were okay, tiny hands quivering, a bitter rant about unfairness heavy on his tongue. Poor Henri had been shocked into quietness, a surprising change for the loud-mouthed devilish boy he was, often said to resemble a mischievous lynx at his best. 

Beau had simply shaken his towhead and laughed, cupping his father’s face in his small speckled hands. So they could look eye-to-eye, his own dappled milky skin a breathtakingly beautiful contrast to his Papa’s natural cacao shade.

Undoubtably his fathers’ son. 

“It doesn’t matter what they say, Papa. Our family is the best family in the whole world. If they say otherwise? Well, _fuck ‘em!_ They must be blind anyways.”

“ _Beauregard LaCroix!_ Watch your _language_ , young man!” His Daddy scolded, but the smile was evident on his face.

Beau had a father for each hand.

Wasn’t that just the best thing in the world?

  
-X-

 

 _“Ain't no angel gonna greet me_  
_It's just you and I my friend_  
_And my clothes don't fit me no more…”_

 

-X-

  
“ _Bri!”_

It didn’t matter if he still had tear-tracks drying on his chipmunk cheeks, a mouth that tasted of stale vomit and blood droplets on his collar. Because he still ran straight into Brian, just as had he had for the better part of both of his lives. For all that age had done to his _Maggie,_ it had not stolen the reflexes needed to catch his disaster gay.

Beau giggled across the years that spread like an ocean between them, as a familiar arm tightened around his waist to prevent him from ending up on his bony bum.

_‘Good catch, Maggie darling!’_

“Good catch, Old lady!”

_‘Always, Fred.’_

“Always, _Fr… Bowie-boy._ ”

The blonde boy pulled away with a scowl on his face. “Oh no, not you too! My brother Henri calls me that all the time.” He rolled his eyes skyward. “My name is _Beau_.” He pouted. _I’m not David, darling. Although, I never did thank him for those lovely flowers at my funeral either. I wonder if he’s been put through the ringer as well. Maybe we’ll see him again someday._

Brian boinged one of Beau’s untamable sandy curls with a fond smile on his face. “Did you like the show?”

“It was marvelous, darling!”

Using his oh-so-refined ballet skills to go up on _relevé_ without a toe-box to secure him, and press a chaste kiss to Brian’s vaguely whiskery cheek, prickles of snowy stubble rasping like sandpaper agains his lips. The action was wholly platonic. Just as it had been in his later years as Freddie. Just another way to show affection, he’d always done the same with Rog and Deaky as well. Another Queen quirk.

Of course now, because of the age difference they didn’t look like a pair of soppy old queens anymore, Beau looked more like a cutesy little _sugar baby._ A thought which he found abundantly hilarious and one that made poor Brian cringe every time it passed his mind, only making it all the more _hilarious_ for Beau.

The dressing room was horribly busy, as they were usual wont to be.

But not so busy that he missed the cold beer being passed into his hands by a grinning Adam Lambert.

Bloody brillant young queen he was. Dripping in jewels and buckets of glitter with a tilted sparkly crown balanced on his head, not unlike most of Beau’s own tarty performance outfits back in the day. _(The sequin jumpsuits had certainly been a crowd favorite)._ In another time and another life, he probably would’ve laced his fingers with that boy’s and pulled him into a conveniently-placed truckstop bathroom for a snog and something _more._ As it stood, Beau was content enough to admire him from a distance.

“Thank you, love. I’m _Beau,_ by the way. You were lovely tonight.” A little blown kiss.

The popstar mimed catching it in one hand and pressing it to his chest, with a little sultry wink. “Thank you.” Even his speaking voice was incredible, obviously talented, Beau had always been a fan of beautiful voices and beautiful people in both of his lives. Adam Lambert fit both qualifications quite well. Darling little campy thing. “Any friend of Brian’s is a friend of mine.”

Roger was staring at him from across the room, sprawled on a stained couch that had properly seen many many fucks in a very short amount of time, blinking slowly and thick tattooed arms crossed.

“Rog,” Bri ushered him over with several come-hither motions. The older man seemed loathe to do so, lifting himself off the couch with a groan ( _one that struck a cord of fear into Beau’s heart. Did he have arthritis? Was he in pain? Could Beau do something? He was pretty sure he had ibuprofen in his backpack…)_ but he did anyway. Brian forcefully bopped Beau over with one hip, until he and Roger were standing eye-to-eye once again. Only this time with less gross bathroom chic in the background.

“This is Beau, the ballet dancer I was talking to you about.”

Ooo, _the ballet dancer._

It made him sound so _mysterious_. Like a killer in _Cluedo_.

He smiled coquettishly, despite himself. Despite the fact that having to talk to poor Roger after all this time was like swallowing gulps of _Drano_.

“Charmed.” A gruff voice and a hand wrapped around his, a familiar calloused hand with ink scrawled across the aging skin. He bent and pressed a kiss to the pointed tip of Roger’s tattoo, that he could see peeking out the edge of his sleeve.

“Honor’s all mine.”

After a few more beers and more than a few mixed drinks, a Scrabble board became the center of everyone’s attention. Set up on a grimy coffee table and having split teams for the best results. Adam and Bri on one team, a tipsy Beau and Rog on the other.

The drinks made things all fuzzy, made it hard to separate one era of his life from another. _(His memories went from a clear distinction of fresh and seawater to a brackish mess)._

So he had no issue about flopping over Roger, who was veritably a stranger in his second life, like a human doll and bouncing about as they drummed up numerous strategies about what to do or play next. The older man didn’t seem to mind his hyperactive tactile tendencies, not until a particular set of tiles caught Beau’s eye. L A Q E R. He snorted as he pointed them out in a breathy whisper.

“Do you remember when Bri played that once, the Q over the triple spot? _Lacquers!_ A 168 point word! We didn’t speak to him for _days_ afterward! Bloody knacker-lacquer!” He giggled behind his hand, not realizing the way Roger stiffened beneath him. “Adds luster to the cluster!”

_‘You can’t possibly expect us to accept that! Recount!’ Rog had demanded, pounding on the (already-rickety) table in their ramshackle tour-bus._

_‘Rog, you can’t call a Recount in Scrabble.’ Bri, ever the sensible gentleman and eager for his fourth win in a row._

_‘Well, he just did, Dr. May! Anything you want to tell us, darling? Got a dictionary up your bum?’ Freddie had quipped, giggling with teeth on full-display._

_‘That would certainly explain some things.’ John groused, still mourning over yet another loss._

“Oh and I checked, dear,” A hiccup. “You can most certainly call a _Recount_ in Scrabble!”

Roger was openly gawking at him, those crows-feet ringed eyes searching his own for answers that he was _never_ going to find there. Blue meeting blue. Azure meeting Oceanic. He cleared his throat, something like tears glimmering in his eyes, and pushed the doughy soft-eyed boy off his lap. Beau let out a sad little whine at the loss of closeness and human touch, his head fuzzy and sloshing.

Brian instantly got up to follow Rog out of the room, racing behind his old friend to steady him.

Leaving Adam and Beau staring at a board that was full, but might as well have been tipped over and spilling its tiles across the floor for all the good it did.

“What was all that about?”

Beau shrugged, curling back into himself once again, as if it would make him safer, protected like one of Bri’s beloved hedgehogs. He’d always hated being alone and would have done anything to avoid it when he was younger. Now, after all these years of it, perhaps it was how he was meant to be. Forever hurting those who meant the most to him. “Said something wrong, I suppose. I do that a lot, love.”

Adam moved to couch so they could sit shoulder-to-shoulder. “Are you okay? What do mean? What did you say?”

He tugged out another long white cigarette, and lit up between his lips. “Trust me, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Tears burned in his eyes like acid rain. _Who would?_

_Pathetic._

The brunette crinkled his nose at the sight. “You really shouldn’t smoke…” Beau simply shook his head, still smiling as sadly as could be. He didn't give a single fuck.

“Bri hates it too." Grinding the butt between his teeth till his mouth was full of ash. "You’re not going to tell on me are you?”

The young star had no qualms about wrapping a shivering Beau into a tight embrace instead. “You seem like you’re in enough trouble as it is. …But, honestly, _try me_. I might surprise you.” A flicker of a bright smile.

_(Roger liked to call Adam, ‘Camp Freddie’)._

Oh, Beau highly doubted that.

  
-X-

 

 _“I walked a thousand miles_  
_Just to slip this skin…”_

 

-X-

  
_“Holy shit.”_ Adam’s eyes were crazy wide and dilated with shock, like they were both on a shared bad acid trip. “You’re not kidding, are you?” Beau shook his head, still looking down to examine his scuffed shoes as if they were the most interesting things in the world. Adam was incredulous. “Holy shit… But _how?_ ”

“Wish I could tell you. I haven’t got a clue.”

He snuffed out his cigarette by dropping it in his glass of scotch, on the rocks of course. Sobering all too fast and realizing what he’d done. He’d given too much away. Rog and Bri were going to toss him to the curb on his ass, labeling him a crazy person consumed by vivid delusions of grandeur no doubt. That was, if sweet Adam didn’t bloody  _crucify_ him first.

“So when Rog ran off…?”

“I mentioned something from our past, a Scrabble game that Brian won with one of his massive smart-ass vocab words.” He shook his head slowly, tears falling where he never meant them to. “I think I scared him. I mean, who _wouldn’t_ be scared? I’m basically a zombie, a living corpse… with _really_ good hair.”

The popstar snorted behind his hand. “For what it’s worth, Freddie. I believe you.”

_My name is Beau._

… _My name is Beau?_

Yet he said nothing at all.

  
-X-

 

 _“The night has fallen, I'm lyin' awake_  
_I can feel myself fading away…”_

 

-X-

  
“Who is _he_ , Brian?” Roger was shaking, holding onto the empty amp case in front of him, like it was his anchor, the life-preserver keeping him afloat. “Who _the fuck_ is that kid?!”

The silver-haired guitarist merely shook his head, holding onto himself when he should have been reaching out for Roger. _Wasn’t that just the story of their lives?_

“Rog… I…”

“He _talks_ like Freddie. He _sounds_ like Freddie. He _walks_ like Freddie. The way he moves his hands when he speaks, sprawls across my lap, gets all giggly and chatty when he’s drunk… _Freddie. Freddie. Freddie. **Freddie!”**_ The drummer grabbed hold of a stray microphone stand and hurled the thing off into the distance as violently as he could. It made a cacophony of wreckage sounds as it hit and rolled across the empty stage. Brian was just happy that he hadn’t put his back out doing it.

His own spindly old man’s hands finally made contact with his oldest friend’s broad warm shoulders, and the once-blonde whipped around with a desperate hiss. “I thought he was an _impersonator_ at first— but no damn impersonator would’ve given himself the marks of an AIDS patient or willfully sported the wrong color hair and eyes! And no impersonator has _ever_ gotten that close with his voice, his _personality…_ ”

Roger had never looked older in that moment, when he turned around with a broken little sob, and his shoulders bowed like the limbs of a weathered tree, hunkering down inside himself in a way he never had before.

It made Brian physically ill.

“So I assumed it must have been _more._ Maybe you’d stumbled across him and kept him around because he reminded you of Fred. God knows I’ve done worse things for lesser reasons…” Roger was trembling, quivering in his shoes and Brian wanted to hold him close but didn’t dare. Not when he knew how upset his drummer already was. How likely he was to be on the receiving end of a crushing sock to the jaw.

“But then I _talked_ to him Bri! He _knows_ things. After a couple of beers he started talking about stuff I’d never told _anyone_. The most mundane stuff, things too boring for interviews. He _knows,_ Bri. At least the drunk bit of him does.” An empty little humorless laugh. “So I’ll ask you again, _Brian Harold May_. Who in the seven hells is that _boy?”_ But before Brian could try again, his best-friend was raising a wavering hand.

“And don’t. _Don’t Don’t Don’t…”_ Every _‘don’t’_ got more and more raw and choked up, each punctuated by a shake of his head. “ _Don’t_ try and tell me that boy is _Freddie._ ”

Roger who hated crying in general was doing so now, silently and with tiny pants turned gasping breaths. And it was breaking Brian’s heart in two.

“Because Fred’s _gone, Brimi_. He’s gone and he’s never _ever_ coming back.” An inhaled breath that sounded more like the rattling of chains. “No amount of pretending or wishing or bargaining is going to _bring him back._ ” Those blue eyes were glassy crystalline with his unshed tears.

“Don’t you think I’ve _tried?”_

Brian closed the gap between them with a little sigh. “I know you have, Rog.” They clung to each other like they were mere boys again. Poor boys with nothing to their name but a couple ham sandwiches and a busted up van. “But Beau is _different._ There’s just something _else_ about him… Just give this a _chance, Roger._ ” His voice cracked. “I thought it was _impossible_ too, you know, I’m a man of science. _I can’t explain this, Roggie._ And that terrifies me. But I do know that if it was possible for Freddie to be back here with us, he would be.”

_Freddie was Freddie._

_Ordinary rules had never applied._

When they managed to muster up the courage to walk back into the dressing room, there was just Adam, nursing a fruity cocktail of something.

“Where’s Beau?” Rog still sounded as rough as could be.

“He left, said he had a performance tomorrow. _Giselle_ , I think?”

  
-X-

 

“ _So receive me brother with your faithless kiss_  
_Or will we leave each other alone like this…”_

 

-X-

  
His pale fingers traced over the bumpy bricks, rough and tanned as terracotta from the London sunshine.

The wall stood the same as it had when he left it.

Unchanged by the years.

So close to the sidewalk that no paparazzi could peer inside and view the intimate goings-on of his life.

If he closed his eyes, he could still pretend that he’d just been out shopping for the day. Jim would be waiting for him you see, working out in the garden in his dungarees, feeding the koi and watching the cherry blossoms fall. It was already that season, you know. Phoebe would be standing in the doorway once he opened the front gate, hands on his hips and a subtle twist of his lips. _‘Are you going to stand there all day, Freddie?’_ He’d say, like the disproving agony aunt he was. _‘Come inside and have a cuppa with us. And get your husband! If he stays out any longer he’s likely to grow leaves.’_

Joe would be cooking up something lovely for dinner, the smell wafting all about the house.

And he would know that he’d come home at last.

Beau opened his eyes then, realizing with a jolt that he was still staring up at Garden Lodge like some sort of loon. Dressed in little more than a faded pair of grey practice tights and ballet flats beneath a faux fur coat, whose hem hovered somewhere about his knees. Mary would have every right to call the police on him, if he lingered much longer.

He wrapped his arms tightly around himself and hurried onward.

Or well, tried to.

A sharp wind snatched a fully formed cherry blossom from the boughs of the weeping cherry tree that overlooked the whole place. _(The place where his ashes rested neatly at the base, forever at peace amongst the branches and roots)_. That blossom danced in the air before his eyes, arms tucked neatly behind his back. Endless _piques, fouettes, chaines turns_ , talking flight in an aerial dance that he could never ever come close to emulating.

In the ultimate test of faith, he opened his cupped hands, and that was where the tiny gorgeous blossom landed.

Just as lovely as the ones he had once plucked and run to show Jim.

_‘Cooee!’ He had trilled, racing over with the blossom cradled in his hands. ‘Look how lovely!’_

_Jim’s answering kiss had been as soft as the petals that brushed against his thumbs._

The thrill of those moments still sent a shiver up his spine. Those same shivers that meant his first life wasn’t finished, despite Freddie Mercury being dead and gone.

It was that same shiver that he'd felt as a little boy, opening his mouth to sing in front of a crowd for the first time. When he became the youngest principal dancer to ever grace the many stages of the Royal Ballet, because above all else, he knew how to work a stage and command an audience. It didn’t matter if his steps were flawless or not, as long as the crowd _believed_ that they were. Belief was half of everything.

He could _act_ , another skill so wrapped up in his soul that it had come along with him. _Endearing, wasn’t it?_

Beau grit his teeth as his hands closed tightly around the blossom, brutally _crushing_ it.

Violently tearing the thing apart with trembling fingers until it fell to the pavement in shreds of what were once a thing of beauty.

Tiny pink shards of loss that peppered the ground beneath his feet like the bread-crumbs in the story of _Hansel and Gretel._ Only he wasn’t being led home, he was walking away down the busy bustling streets of London, the shards sprinkled after him like lost wishes in the wind. _Will-o'-the-wisps_ leading him farther and farther away from the place that had once been his home.

For once, he didn’t cry as he looked up at the sky.

He did something far worse.

He looked away and continued walking.

Trudging away into anonymity.

  
-X-

 

“ _On the Streets of Philadelphia…”_

 

-X-

 


	4. I'm lonely, but no one can tell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Featured is The Great Pretender! Cover by Freddie Mercury and originally by The Platters! ;D
> 
> The Gujarati song is Ranglo, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjwjcW3oqIY
> 
> And the links in Brian's messages correspond to the dances the descriptions were based on. :P
> 
> (Also fun fact: Beau can flawlessly rap and adores Ice Ice Baby, much to everyone else's chagrin).
> 
> Fanart of Beau visiting Garden Lodge by this eternally beautiful human:
> 
> https://theoddowldoodle.tumblr.com/post/181357180748/a-visit-a-fanart-of-beau-passing-by-the-garden#notes

_“Oh yes I'm the great pretender_  
_Pretending I'm doing well_  
_My need is such, I pretend too much_  
_I'm lonely but no one can tell…”_

 

 

Beau woke up the sound of his own voice blaring through the speaker of his rose-gold iPhone _(matching Bri’s, of course)_ and enough spam texts to make the damn thing have a seizure in his hand.

He peered down at the tiny screen sullenly, the device so intensely bright in the surrounding darkness that that he could feel his poor eyes practically _bleeding,_ shriveling up like raisins in the sun. _Was that even possible while they were still in his head? (He didn’t want to find out)._

He scrolled through a few dozen texts from his bitchy brothers and Adam, they’d been ‘fighting’ the previous night and he wasn’t quite ready to face that mess yet. _(Could it be really considered fighting though, when he’d been fighting on Adam’s behalf?)._

Mr. Adam Lambert had become something of a confidante these past few weeks.

A single blessed person who didn’t treat him like a shadow of someone else, or a bad memory.

With all his quirks and faults, Beau was genuinely surprised that Bri _(and Rog by proxy)_ kept him around at all, a constant reminder of their dead best-friend _(and once-lover)_ that never quite fit. His own second family couldn’t process any more Freddie Mercury related information and every single thing he let slip was yet another nail in Beau LaCroix’s coffin. Sometimes it felt like he was always apologizing for being something he wasn’t.

_I’m sorry I can’t be him..._

Adam had flopped down next to him on the couch the night before, dressed in a fluffy pair of pink pajamas and with his hair pulled back in a sparkly diamond-encrusted headband, the same thick moisturizing avocado mix spread across his cheeks that Beau was sporting on his own.

“Why always with the black?” The rising star had bemoaned, as he viciously went at Beau’s small hand with a spare nail-file.

The blonde had just huffed a laugh. “It was this dumb thing that Bri and I used to do together. Back when we were glam.” He sounded far-too-old and wistful when he talked about it, just like he always did where his boys were concerned.

Adam had leveled him with the most scathing look he could muster. “When you _were_ glam? Freddie, Bri wears more glitter than I do, and he drags me to nail salons far more often than I go alone. That’s saying something, considering I’m Adam _Glambert.”_ Another easy smile. “Besides who wears nail polish on just one hand anyway, besides you and Bri? The ultimate _diva_ power-move.”

Beau deadpanned, but on the inside, his heart was practically singing. Brian had started wearing the white nail varnish again? …But _why? Did he really remind Brimi that much of his former self? Had he given too much away?_

“Speaking of, I’m going to be out of a job soon, aren’t I?” A terrifying prospect for every artist in the business and yet Adam said it with the sweetest smile on his face. As though he were happy about the future job insecurity. The younger was about to ask what he meant, when the glam-rocker added a soft little: “When you tell them, you’ll be the one up there performing again, Fred. I can’t wait to see it.”

Instead of the delighted reaction Adam had probably been expecting and planned for, Beau made a shrill sound in the back of his throat like a kicked puppy and stood up too fast, dislodging Adam and allowing the towhead to back away for all he was worth, fervently shaking his head.

He always sounded funny when he was surprised, a little quirk he’d forever possessed. It was because of his particularly odd vibrato. Roger had once compared it to the bleating of a sheep.

“I’m not telling them, dear.” It was a rasp, his chest clenched tight in a vice. “I can’t.” Forcing a smile to add levity to such an awful situation.

“But…” Adam’s dark eyes were soulful and resplendent in the lowlight. “You’re _Freddie?”_

Yes, as if that _meant_ something.

The lost little boy bristled instantly, turning away with those fluttering hands pressed flat against his stomach, as if he were going to be violently sick. Eyes closed against it all and with those dainty pale blonde butterfly lashes draped so delicately against his sticky cheekbones. “What is that supposed to _mean?”_ He sighed, his voice oozing defeat. _“Freddie Mercury is dead and Beau LaCroix never really existed at all.”_

Adam’s gentle hand wove itself around his and pulled him close, or well he _tried_. Beau was frozen where he stood, knees locked and eyes glassy.

“Freddie, you aren’t dead.” _Anymore._

The unspoken word hung between them like a burial shroud. Perhaps his own.

“Oh no, my dear. I’m not.” His voice broke. “But the love of my life is. My best-friends are just a decade or two away from the crypt, I’ve managed to disappoint not only one set of parents, but two, and I get to look at the pretty shattered remains of the life I once lived, _every… bloody… day_.” He sunk down to the floor. “I ruined their lives, darling. How could I ever apologize for that? I have to stay dead, I absolutely _must._ ”

Adam wasted no time pulling Beau into his chest this time, pressing his face into those unruly curls and holding them both until the blonde’s erratic breathing evened out again.

“I can’t hurt them again.” He’d openly sobbed into that obnoxiously pink fluff of a neckline. _They would never believe me anyway._ “I won’t steal these last good years away from them.”

_Oh how I wish… that I’d never been born at all._

“It’s the last good thing I can do, love. The last real gift I can give them.”

 _So no, I’m not going sing on stage at some bloody parody concert, one that won’t really matter in the end._ Barbs Beau didn’t throw, as they fell far too close to his heart. Precariously so.

Adam busied himself carding his fingers through Beau’s incorrigible hair instead and humming something light and airy without words under his breath. Wishing that he could say, with all his might: _Don’t you know that the biggest gift you could ever give them, would be coming back home again? Don’t you know how long they’ve been waiting for you? How long that champagne glass has been sitting full and untouched on the piano?_

 _Oh, Great Pretender…_ Adam’s fingers stilled when he felt Beau go limp, having fallen into a fitful sleep. _It’s time to stop pretending. You aren’t fooling anyone..._

Beau skipped those incoming texts and focused on Brian’s instead, he had a number of them, and couldn’t help the little warm smile when he realized that they were addressed like letters.

Yet one stuck out as being the strangest.

_B, why would you hide this from me? you didn’t say you danced for the MP Trust??? -Bri x_

_https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhD2RW-zl-U_

Huh? Because he _hadn’t?_

He quickly clicked on the link and understood, cringing at his tiny speckled fifteen-year-old self doing a rapid-fire ribbon dance to _Respect by Erasure_ for World AIDS Day, dressed in a tight canary yellow jumpsuit that ended where his thighs did. He’d tugged a white Mercury Phoenix Trust t-shirt over it, pairing the assemble with a pair of scuffed white sneakers. A sketch of his phoenix from a lifetime ago, guarding the bolded words: _THE MERCURY PHOENIX TRUST ~ FIGHTING AIDS WORLDWIDE._

He was so proud of his boys. The sudden swallowing ocean of sentiment would creep up on him sometimes and he’d have to pause just to take a breath.

They weren’t _his_ anymore. Not by a long shot.

But he distinctly remembered filming that dance.

Marching out with nothing prepared, his thousand birthmarks on full-display. Certainly not the moment to hide them. And just letting _loose_. Passion pouring from his fingertips and an unspeakable joy buoying his heart. He whipped that bloody ribbon for all he was worth. Twirling off into oblivion. Bending his knees, swiveling his hips, just forgetting about technique and precision and all the rules of Ballet. Closing his eyes and remembering what it was to just… _dance._

Dance like he used to.

Like an explosion, the denotation of an atomic bomb onstage.

_(Sometimes huge sprawling cities were obliterated in the name of freedom. Sometimes legions of innocent men and women died for justice, for the greater good. Another bloody footprint in the path to righteousness. A necessary loss…_

_Right?)_

It probably sounded horribly petty, but he’d hated it at first.

Being made into the poster boy for an illness that he had spent the remainder of his life trying to avoid?

But the realization that his name had changed public perception of the issue and provided another way for funding to funnel in? That was forgivable. That was noble.

_I wish I could tell you two, just how much I love you._

_How I never stopped…_

He watched himself dart to the edge of the stage to snag an operator’s misplaced rolling office chair and a fire-extinguisher, using it to fly by, wrapped in the red ribbon like a Christmas gift and propelled by the extinguisher’s pressurized contents. Screeching like a banshee as he hurtled across the stage, red confetti cannons going off behind him.

_Cuz it was a mil yrs ago Bri :)_

He sent it off and clicked on the next link, an insta post.

_Hello ! Everyone, I’d like to introduce a good friend of mine and Rog! ! This is Beau LaCroix, a principal ballet dancer for The Royal, one of the key figures breaking through gender stereotypes via ballet! A boy who can just as easily play a strapping young prince or an evil sorcerer-king, as he can a beautiful fairy or a phoenix reaching for the light! ! ! Bri x_

_https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC6MmmLKEmA_

The clip was of him dancing _Firebird._

Strips of gossamer cloth curling up from his flesh-toned leotard, like tendrils of a dying flame that lapped at his skin. Blood red pointe shoes catching on the stage floor as he went around and around, arms sweeping up and down like wings, about to allow him the joy of taking flight once more. Red teardrop Swarovski crystals dotted in just the right places to catch the eye. To make it look like he was catching alight.

Only _The Firebird_ wasn’t a _phoenix._

It didn’t have that luxury.

 _The Firebird_ was a creature of myth and legend, a _blessing_ to its captors…

And at the same time, a _curse_.

  
-X-

  
That insta post was very very public and probably the number one reason Charlie was going to murder him in the most prolific of ways.

  
-X-

  
Beau leaving home to join the _Royal Ballet Academy_ in London hadn’t been the easiest adjustment, for anyone involved.

And especially not for his brothers.

Beau and Charlie didn’t talk for _days._ It was like existing in a parallel universe where there was an invisible wall separating them at all times. A glass box that allowed them to glide past each other without the slightest hint of contact.

The night before Beau left for school, Baptiste just couldn’t stand it anymore, he confronted his older brother on the back-porch and he wasn’t backing down. Fists clenched and eyes dark with rage as he squared up, not sure if it would come to blows or not, but not wanting to be ill-prepared if it did.

“You’re coming to the airport tomorrow.” The second-eldest’s voice broached no argument. But of course Charlie did anyway.

“Trying to be forceful, Tits? That’s _cute_.”

He reached out and turned Charlie around roughly to face him, instead of staring out into the New Orleans nightlife and shimmering lights in the never-dark. “No, I’m not _trying_ anything. I _am_ being forceful. This _is_ my forceful.” He gritted his teeth tight and shook his head of dyed-turquoise hair. “What the _fuck_ are you doing, Char!?”

“I’m protecting our baby brother.”

 _“No!”_ Baptiste stomped his foot and sounded like the child he ached to protect instead of the grown man he was. “You’re _pushing him away,_ he won _The Prix de Fonteyn_ , the most prestigious dance competition in the world, and that means he gets to go study at _The Royal!_ That’s all he’s ever wanted! You cannot _punish him_ for that!”

Charlie reeled back as if Baptiste had punched him square in his mouth, his dark eyes alight with muted fire. “I am not _punishing_ him! _I’m pissed off!_ You know _why_ he picked _The Royal!_ Of all the places in the world to go, Australia, New York, Vienna, and yet he picked _The Royal…_ ”

The younger let his eyes droop to the floor. “We always knew he was going to pick The Royal. Don’t act so fucking _surprised._ He deserves to live his life the way he wants it.”

“But he’s not living _his_ life is he? He’s living _Freddie Mercury’s._ ”

**_“Will both of you just give it a rest, please?!”_ **

Henri was dressed in a pair of wrinkled baggie blue boxer shorts and a _Dora the Explorer_ band-aid across his nose. “Why do you get to play judge, jury and executioner with B’s life?” Unlike Baptiste, Henri had no qualms in shoving Charlie backwards for all he was worth, despite being the size of an _Oompa Loompa (and that was a generous comparison)._

“Oh, so you’re both ganging up on _Charlie the Asshole?”_

“Actually no, I despise you both _equally.”_ Henri spun around and turned on Baptiste, mocking the family peacemaker’s motherly tone. “ _Oh I’m JB, let me protect my sweet and precious little baby brother! Ooo, are you crying, angel, let me kiss it better!_ ” Punctuating it by a roll of his eyes. Then deepening his voice for an imitation of Charlie. _“Oh I’m Char, let me be Mr. Macho Man and blame everyone but myself and B for his fucked up headspace. Let me punch all the problems away, I’m sure that’ll fix everything!”_

He shook his head in disgust.

“Both of you are complete and utter _banana balls.”_ Clicking his tongue and flashing spirit fingers to emphasize just how much so. “Maybe treat him like he’s the grown-ass man he is and respect the shitty life experiences that he’s _never going to be able to forget?_ Hm? Is that really so hard?”

Baptiste shrugged, looking down at his bare feet. “He’s just a kid, _mon chou.”_

Henri shook his head again, his smile tinged with sadness.

“No, I don’t think _our Bowie-boy_ ever was.”

  
-X-

 

 _“Too real is this feeling of make believe_  
_Too real when I feel what my heart can't conceal…”_

 

-X-

  
He flopped across his bed, attacking the coming week’s pointe shoes with his toolbox.

_Snap. Tear. Rip. Sew. Darn. Crack. Slash. Paint. Repeat._

_Can you not die after five minutes onstage, please?_ What he asked of every single pointe shoe that he crammed onto his stupidly-arched feet.

He had natural ballerina feet that happily curved into and held a deep beautiful arch, long before he’d trained them to do so. But beautifully arched feet did not make for strong dancer’s feet. So he’d used the pointe training to build up that much needed strength, even though boys rarely had the body to keep up with the such training, simply too muscular and broad to hold themselves up on a toe-box and do the intricate moves needed for advanced pointe training.

Beau had grown up a bit like a knockoff _Thumblina_ so his feet had no problem accommodating his burgeoning girth, or lack thereof. And his male partners had no problem hefting him about either. Yet he was no slouch, he could easily hold a female partner above his head without breaking a sweat if needed.

That was simply how ballet training was.

He was unique, but not _that_ unique.

He was good, but not _that_ good.

He wasn’t a traditional male ballet dancer, but perhaps that was why he was either coveted as a prize by the ballet community or despised as a virtueless rebel.

The best position to be in.

He had spent the morning conducting a class for the Royal Academy, the upper years were preforming _La Sylphide,_ which meant that Beau got to teach the future primas the dances of the sylph. A woodland fairy hopelessly in love with a man set to be married.

One of the other principals with Godiva doe eyes had been helping him demonstrate the traditional portion, as his own style was a bit _odd_. But he could still teach both portions when it came down to it, just like he could dance both, as James and the sylph.

He used his heels to crush the toe-boxes of each pointe shoe, used his hands to snap the shank where his natural arch broke, walked around for a good hour or so on demi-pointe as he did his laundry, and finally dipped them in rubbing alcohol, softening up the sides.

  
-X-

 

“ _Oh yes I'm the great pretender_  
_Adrift in a world of my own_  
_I play the game but to my real shame_  
_You've left me to dream all alone…”_

 

-X-

  
Freddie loved the beach, he loved the water, it was a part of him.

He grew up wading in the waves of a place called _Nakupenda_. The water was the same color as Baptiste’s dyed hair in his second life, the same color as his own eyes as Beau. The same indecipherable cerulean as _Roger’s_ eyes now.

He and Kash had run through those choppy rolling waves together. They would race out into the water in nothing but their skivvies, holding hands and waiting to see if they were stronger than the tide. If their tiny clasped hands could stay clasped and beat the power of the elements. The startling gusts of water would catch them like the tender hands of a mother, raising them off their feet in a weightless void. The depths below had never felt like a danger to him. The waters had never torn him away from Kash, despite every odd and every challenge, they had stayed together. Forever.

He wouldn’t really drown until he was a fully-grown man, laying in bed, wrapped up in a room that felt like a tomb and with his last breaths rattling away in his lungs.

Or until he appeared at the wavering knees of a poor Russian girl, a collection of matchsticks and blood forming her wan body. Born into a blanket of November snow.

Freddie had loved dragging the boys to the beach, marching along in the sand that turned the daintiest steps into lasting memory. Dancing in the glittering spray of the sea in a way that only he could. If they toured anywhere by the ocean, there was always a beach trip.

_‘Fred,’ Roger had laughed breathlessly once, flopped on the sand and gasping after piggybacking the human toothpick for what felt like a mile. ‘What are you doing?’_

_‘Singing, my dear.’ Freddie had tossed his fluffy dark-haired head back, trilling a song in Gujarati. One whose title he did not remember, but a sentiment that he had never forgotten. ‘He mara palav no chedlo mein, chohala ho chey, Ke man maru dhadke chey, Ek chodvo ne hu to tari vel, hu morlo ne tu dhel, Ke man maru dhadke chey…’ Singing it as he sang his own songs, his heart full of joy._

_‘What does it mean, Freddie?’ John had asked, rare as it was for them to see Freddie so outspoken and proud about his heritage._

_‘It’s supposed to be sung by a woman for the man she loves…’ He shrugged. ‘That’s all I remember, Kash and I used to sing it together as children.’ Singing to the sea._

Beau whooped like a crazed wild thing as he ran through the clumpy sand that squished between his toes and directly into the waves. Twirling around and around like a trapped ballerina in a music box, like he’d never left the hold of the sea at all. Carried on the arms of his mother, as though each wave was another hand caressing his round spotted cheeks.

Of course Rog would have a summer home by the sea.

He and Bri were sitting with their freezing bums in the sand, watching their demonic little blonde charge run around squealing like a little boy. Just as they always had. Whether he be Freddie or Beau, he would always adore the water. Anita was sitting on a nearby blanket, her head resting on Bri’s shoulder, Sarina was with Rog and a few of the kids were in and out of the house. But those who had known him in both his lives, couldn’t tear their eyes away from the excited boy.

Adam raced up behind him and heaved a screeching Beau over one shoulder, spinning them around like a teacup ride at Disney world, his knees bent and arms pinwheeling.

When his dripping dizzy self wobbled over and dumped himself into his old bandmates’ laps, he shook out his curls like a wet dog. Every damp sunshine ringlet sticking up on end like an Ancient Greek painting of Medusa. He beamed up at Bri and Anita through his bleary eyes.

“Hello Anita, my dear. Looking as ravishing as ever.” He crinkled his nose as he pressed a big dramatic kiss to the top of her hand.

“She’s a keeper, _Mags.”_ A wink, his tongue half lolling out of his mouth, a giddy flush high in his cheeks. Carefree. Careless. 

_He’d once said something entirely different, ‘It’ll never last, darling.’ He’d once tsked at his frustrated best-friend. ‘You two are far too different.’_

_Yet Miss Anita Dobson had been far more stubborn than he’d given her credit for._

And she’d given his Maggie a reason to keep going through everything. He would never ever be able to thank her enough for that.

But he didn’t dwell, instead he was up and splashing again, joined by a few of the grandchildren in his pursuit to completely cover Rog in wet sand while he slept, the perfect victim.

 _“God!_ You little _shit!”_

The drummer yowled like a tomcat in heat and Beau couldn’t manage to stop laughing. “I’m not _God_ , I’m _Beau,_ darling. But thank you for the compliment!”

Roger ran over to him in the same way Adam had, the fear of capture making Beau scream and run away, cackling like some sort of demon witch, a Baba Yaga.

While Anita turned to Brian with a new look in her light eyes. “Love, _is he…? Did he just call you…?_ Maybe I’m seeing things but…” At her first tentative words, her husband of nearly two decades had hunched inward and nodded into her shoulder, leaning his wrecked frame against her for all he was worth, shattering more with every stilted trembling breath.

“‘Nita, it’s not that. Rog and I see it too.” He just sounded so broken and she pressed a featherlight kiss into his snowy owl curls.

“Love, it’s going to be alright.” She held him tight, stroking his back and humming a wordless little tune under her breath, left over from one of her own shows. She had supported him through Freddie’s death and she would certainly support him through whatever this was. Whoever Beau was or wasn’t.

Roger seemed to have a similar idea with the way he watched Beau collapse on the sand again, one of the grandkids curled up and pressed into his heaving dotted chest. The boy began singing a familiar little tune. And it was the beginning of the end. He couldn’t deny it anymore.

“He mara palav no chedlo mein, chohala ho chey, Ke man maru dhadke chey, Ek chodvo ne hu to tari vel, hu morlo ne tu dhel, Ke man maru dhadke chey…”

“What does that mean?”

Beau just shrugged, tossing that head of blonde curls, turned crunchy from the surf and sand.

“I think it’s supposed to be sung by a woman for the man she loves… But who knows?”

Roger backed up, breathing hard in a way that wasn’t because of the unexpected exercise, his eyes blown wide. Freddie’s voice. Freddie’s _singing_ voice as well. Freddie’s special song. Still singing to the sea.

He couldn’t breathe. Fuck. Was this what a heart-attack felt like? He slowly staggered towards the messy blanket, through the light airy sand that felt like quicksand all of a sudden, dragging him _down, down, down_ into the depths, fathoms below. Drowning on land instead of the sea. Like _his_ Freddie had. He fell to his knees next to Bri and Anita.

“Brimi, we have to call Deaks.”

“Rog?” Brian was instantly concerned, reaching out to steady him.

The tormented drummer looked every bit his age as he gazed brokenly over at their newly shared blonde pain-in-the-ass.

“I believe you, okay? I’m starting to believe in this whole fucking mess.” A shudder ran through the younger of the two old men and it ended with a shaky order. “Call Deaky, now. Because if anyone’s going to know on first sight, it’s Deaks.” Roger was clenching and unclenching his quivering calloused hands. “I would ask the kid, crazy old bloke I am, I’d just blame it on that, but _he doesn’t know_. He can’t possibly _know_ …”

Anita furrowed her sculpted frosty brows, “What do mean, why couldn’t he know? He’s here, isn’t he?”

Brian was the one who answered, smiling sadly. “Because Freddie would have come to us the first chance he got, it would have been the first thing out of his mouth. Not _this_. It wouldn’t have been _this,_ ‘Nita.”

Roger rolled his eyes. “Bri’s trying to say that Fred was _an attention whore.” Through and through._

The soppy guitarist huffed a laugh through his tears. “That too.”

  
-X-

 

 _“Oh yes I'm the great pretender_  
_Just laughing and gay like a clown_  
_I seem to be what I'm not you see_

 _I'm wearing my heart like a crown_  
_Pretending that you’re…_  
_Pretending that you're still around…”_

 

-X-


	5. Oh please, don't cry, you liar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yay ANGST!!! I promise next chap will cover WHAT HAPPENED IN THAT ROOM. :DDDD

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Features Liar by Mumford and Sons, Doing All Right and Too Much Love Will Kill You by Queen. 
> 
> Here's a video on Anastasia by the Royal Ballet:  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BuWCQ868bY
> 
> Also Brian calls Adam, "Madam Lambert" and that's why it's in here. :D
> 
> ALSO I HAVE SOMEHOW CONNED AN ART WIZARD INTO DOING ART!!! https://theoddowldoodle.tumblr.com/post/181427700408/heres-a-bunch-of-doodles-of#notes
> 
> How???? COULD ANYONE LIKE THIS THAT MUCH??

_“I know that things are broken_  
_And though there's too many words left unsaid_  
_You say you have spoken_  
_Like the coward I am, I hang my head…”_

 

They were eating dinner at Beau’s when it happened.

Well, dinner was a couple of toasty grilled cheese sandwiches and some lukewarm tomato soup, but close enough. Beau hadn’t even thought twice before cutting the crusts off Roger’s and picking up some vegan cheese from the market that morning for Bri, just in case the older man’s vegetarian tendencies had stretched farther in his later years. He had spent a lifetime listening to them bitch, so in the back of his mind, doing those little things happened absently.

Roger had stared down at the little crustless triangles with gritted teeth and unexpectedly teary eyes, just as unexpected to all three of them it would seem. Rog blinked viciously like the tears were a surprising hindrance and betrayal, only making it worse with the force in which he did it, as Beau chuckled fondly.

“Why the tears, love?” Reaching out his hands without a proper thought to the matter and using his thumbs to wipe them away. “Is my cooking really that bad?”

_‘Roggie dear, how on earth do I boil an egg?’_

_‘I don’t know, Fred… I think it’s got something to do with water?’_

Well, yes, yes it was that bad. But that wasn’t the issue at hand.

Bri took an experimental sip of the tea Beau had made, pulling a face before setting it down and folding his hands like a prim and proper lady.

“Beau, Rog and I were wondering if you…” _Damn._ He’d started so strong and then floundered, the very moment he met those inquisitive blue eyes head-on. “That is to say, we were…” And that resolve was crumbling again, within moments it was in scrambled pieces. The young blonde could see how the older man was struggling and he reached out a determined tiny hand, poised to rub little circles into the weathered skin of the guitarist’s palm to comfort him.

“It’s quite alright love, take your time.” His voice oozed with care and tenderness.

The drummer’s lined eyes searched out Brian’s, begging him to continue and say the bygone extortionate words that neither of them could seem to find.

Yet those weren’t the sorry tale that left his lips.

“We’re making a movie, Rog and I. And well, your voice is remarkably similar to our dear Fred’s. We’d like you to do overdubs on a few of the tracks and impromptu soundbites. If it isn’t too much trouble?”

Roger rolled his eyes skyward and had to disguise the ensuing groan that left his lips, with a well-placed cough. _Bri, you sodding old fool, wrong question, as per usual._ But the oldest bloke had plain panicked. It wasn’t a lie, they were making a movie, with several actors lined up and casting calls underway, the product of nearly a decade of work. Overdubs would sure as hell save them a lot of production and editing time and money. But it certainly wasn’t what he’d been intending to ask. The same question burning on his lips that had haunted him for as long as he’d known the boy with the birthmarks and indecipherable oceanic eyes.

“Oh.” Beau sounded surprised. “Sure, I suppose. I honestly can’t hear what you mean but… alright, if you say so. You’re making a movie about Freddie?”

Roger cleared his throat, studying the grooves of the coffee table before him, playing with the remaining sandwich pieces on his plate, anything to not have to meet Beau’s big searching eyes. “It’s about Queen. But we can’t have Queen without Freddie.” Smiling in a way that didn’t quite fit his face, as he finally looked up and tried to find something in Beau’s own. Something he must have missed before, something to prove him wrong.

Rog didn’t see anything there, just the cold flinch of unwelcome surprise.

“Really? ‘Cause you seem to be doing just fine with Madam Lambert.”

Brian froze, eyes grown huge, shaking his head and with those softened cheeks turned ashen, as if the most horrible thought had just occurred to him. Something that could change everything. “You don’t like Adam?” Like Beau’s opinion meant everything to him. As though it were the bloody axe resting on the executioner’s shoulder.

His own breath stopped, his chest tightening up like a child’s hands around a fistful of Play-Doh. _Oh, holy shit. Did Bri know? Did Rog suspect? No, no, no, oh God no. No!_ It felt as though there was an elephant sitting on his chest, sucking the breath straight from his lungs like a straw.

He couldn’t do this to them, he wouldn’t do this to them.

He’d rather die all over again, than hurt them the way he had the first time around. His own death didn’t scare him anymore, not the way theirs did. Their pain. Their anguish.

He refused to be the spark this time, the fire that burned so beautifully, so bright and covered the world in splashes of new colorful light, only to grow stronger and more powerful over time, consuming anything and everything in its path, devouring the world like Jörmungandr eating his own tail.

_(Fires so often burn themselves out. Burn themselves. Consume the world around them until there is nothing left at all)._

“No, no! I love Adam.” He really did.

The boy was exceptional, a force to be reckoned with. Sweet Adam who didn’t try to replace him onstage. Adam who had shown Beau nothing but a world full of kindness. Put up with his bitchiness and fucked up head at all hours of the night, who was ready to give it all up just for Beau’s happiness and the rightening of the world. _(Beau could never allow him to do that)_. Adam who was probably a saint with jewel encrusted fingernails. “It’s just…” His own breath caught and he forced the words out like removing shards of broken glass from massacred flesh with a set of dull tweezers.

“Makes you think that maybe, just maybe, you could have done all of this without him. Maybe Freddie was just _dead-weight.”_

His smile turned caustic, as though a mal-caught venomous creature from the garden.

“ _Oops_.”

Knowing very well about what he’d said and how he’d said it. Knowing very well what it would do to them to hear that from his lips. Knowing full well that the Freddie he’d once been, would never have said such a thing. Ever. Well, fuck it, he wasn’t that Freddie anymore.

If he wasn’t as weak as he’d been that night at the Ballet, he would never have done such a thing in the first place. Getting involved with them was wrong, foolish, a child’s error.

_You godforsaken selfish little prick._

_You made your bed, a lifetime ago. Lie in it._

Roger was up in arms within the instant, those clear blue eyes turned gray and stormy and his jaw gritted as he hit the ground running. A single finger pointed directly at Beau’s chest. “You take that back, right now, kid! You don’t know anything about _him!_ Anything about _us!”_

_Oh Rog, I know far too much._

“Actually, it seems to me, like you didn’t really know him at all.” His voice sounded dead. As he should have been, rotting in the ground.

“How dare you!?” Roger was shaking, it had been years since he’d seen the once-blonde so angry. Old age seemed to have mellowed him. Or at least it had until Beau had come careening into their lives, a perfect human wrecking ball. Ripping open old wounds full of bulky scar-tissue, wounds that hadn’t healed perfectly but had closed all the same.

“What Roggie, not being _honest_ enough for you?” He was shivering and it wasn’t from any kind of cold. “Does it hurt to hear it in my voice?” His voice. Our voice. An echo from beyond the grave. “To know that he didn’t come back for you after all? That he didn’t stay for you? That he gave up when the going got hard? When life wasn’t fun anymore? When it wasn’t even a life anymore? Don’t you just _resent him_ for it?”

The slap tasted like blood and fear and was far from being Roger’s strongest. They had often come to blows as young men, so the open-handed nature of the slap was quite familiar. A blessing in disguise.

He could almost pretend, blinking through his fuzzy eyes, that it was a young hale and hardy Roger Taylor scowling back at him. Yelling about his bloody car song that had somehow made its way onto their record, or how Freddie wasn’t pulling his weight in the band or how dare he take a solo album deal without consulting them first.

Being a prick meant paying for it.

His face stung and the blow had cause him to chomp down on one cheek, tearing out a piece of flesh and allowing blood to drip down his chin.  
  
The sight must have done something to Brian, because he’d leapt to his feet in an instant, as if planning to take up his old position and work his way in-between them, holding them both back with a hand on both chests.

_‘Calm down, Mohammad Ali!’ Poor long-suffering Bri as Freddie had raised his fists in a boxer’s stance, just like he had as a boy._

_“Roger!”_ He roared, eyes hard and steely, but both of them tuned out their shared Dr. May, going at it just how they once had.

“How dare you!? How dare you stand there with _his_ …” The drummer was standing there, fists clenched and breathing hard as his voice cut off treacherously. He closed his eyes and turned to the side, bringing a shaking fist to his mouth and pressing it against his lips. Preventing him from saying anything else he might regret.

It was a kind of restraint that the younger Roger had never possessed and it made Beau bristle.

“With his _what?!”_ He barked, callously.

Beau didn’t know why, but he just couldn’t be there any longer, he staggered away from the table and over to a nearby window, looking out over a rainy day. Hooking his fingers into the pane to steady himself. His eyes were burning and he blamed it on the pain from the red welt spreading across his cheek.

“My name is _Beauregard LaCroix_ , that is who I am.” He swallowed hard and couldn’t help thinking of another place and another window and another hard conversation that had torn him open and left him bleeding out. Only this time there was no villain to egg him on. No selfish gain or neediness to fuel his lackluster actions. Only his wish to prevent the pain that he had caused in his last life. “If you’re looking for someone to play the part of a dead man, if you’re here searching for a replacement, a ghost? Then get the hell out of my house.”

 _Too much love will kill you_  
_Just as sure as none at all…_

Old barbs weighed down his tongue and he couldn’t stop them, not then, not now. And he despised himself for it. “There is nothing here for you. You’re not my family, you’re not my damned keepers. You’re just a couple of senile old men, looking for a miracle in a familiar voice that you probably don’t even remember properly anyway.”

 _And the pain will make you crazy_  
_You're the victim of your crime…_

“And if that’s really the case, it might be better to start the search for a good home.”

It felt like he was dying all over again, his organs full of lesions and twisting around and around on top of one another, strangling him from the inside.

He heard them move towards the door, Roger first, his eyes cold and Beau could feel the way they bored deepening holes into his stolen soul.

“I can’t believe what I thought I saw in you.”

Raspy and broken.

 _You'd give your life, you'd sell your soul…_  
_But here it comes again._

“Neither can I.”

_Too much love will kill you, in the end._

He waited till they’d left, Brian had gone so quietly that Beau didn’t even hear him move until the gentle closure of the door, to fall to his knees and weep.

He lit up a cigarette and queued up the _One Week Later_ interviews, relishing in the taste of blood and soot mixing on his tongue.

_Look what you did, and look at the pain you’re saving them. They’ve mourned for you. They’ve moved on._

_Let them live._

  
-X-

  
“ _And all these things I can't describe_  
_You would rather I didn't try_  
_But please don't cry, you liar_  
_Oh please, don't cry, you liar_ …”

  
-X-

  
The first time he ever performed with the company it was a three-act piece called _Anastasia_ , based off the story of a lost girl called Anna Anderson and another girl called Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia.

And the very slight chance that they could have been one and the same.

  
-X-

  
_“And you lay careless your head on my chest_  
_And don't even look at me looking my best_  
_You would rather I didn't try…_ ”

  
-X-

  
Kit St.Cloud was curled up on the dirty floor of his bedroom, his arms wrapped tight around his stomach, blood and spittle oozing from his half-agape mouth.

His breaths were emerging in odd shallow pants that denoted the several broken ribs he was sporting. But he still crawled towards the window when he heard the rapid knocks on the pane. It was Damie, it was always Damie. He dragged himself up and caught sight of his grotesque face in the reflection, his swollen lip, all the dried blood, one of his eyes swollen shut and a rainbow of bruises spreading across his skin. More purple-blue than anything else. But they were little more than dark plumes over a set of healing ones, and even more healing beneath. A lifetime of injuries. A human Jackson Pollock painting.

He unlatched the glass and pushed it open, groaning despite himself, when he felt Adamien’s soft hands scoop up his face, painfully gentle, positioning it to meet the light.

“Oh kitten,” Adamien sounded so hurt. “What the hell did he do to you?”

Kit flashed that impish grin of his, wry and sad. “He kicked the shit out of me, Damie. What else is new?”

There was blood smeared across his teeth.

“What for this time?”

The younger boy shrugged, in a way that only exacerbated the pain in his chest and left him crying, gasping and sagging against the window and Damie.

“Shit!” His boyfriend cursed and caught him though, just in the nick of time, Adamien was always there when Kit needed him. The only good thing in his life that had ever stuck around through the bad times and waded through the gigantic mess to wrap his arms around him. “Baby, I’m gonna get you out of here. Now.”

Kit shook his head, woozily. “To go to the hospital?”

“Yes, about three cities away from here and then even more when you’re better.”

The younger boy froze. “Damie, my Dad…” He could feel the tears stinging the open wounds on his cheeks. “I can’t go. He still needs me.”

Adamien’s eyes were warm and shining far too bright with the tears that welled up there. “I’ve left this long enough, kitten. I won’t let him hurt you anymore. And if you stay here…” He’ll kill you. “I’m going to climb back down the fire escape okay? And you jump down and I’ll carry you the rest of the way.”

His best-friend, his lover, his boyfriend, hit the ground and opened up his arms.

He could never really tell Damie the truth about why his father always beat up on him. Kit scooted to the edge of the windowsill, his heart in his throat. That most of those fights had been rooted in his ‘hellish’ sexuality and the sweet boy with the untamed afro curls and soft smile who left flowers on the doorstep and post-it love notes on his window. His father had always treated him like dirt, it just got worse after Damie became more than just his best-friend.

That wouldn’t change the fact that Damie was the best thing to ever happen to him.

“Okay, now hop down, I’ll catch you!”

He spared one last look around the hell-hole that had become his life and took one last shuddering breath before he jumped, landing square in his boyfriend’s hold.

 _I will give you the world._ Adamien LaCroix promised his boyfriend as he carried the tiny slip of a thing away in his arms. _I will give you the big family and warm house that he didn’t._ Four chaotic little boys, an enormous extended family that stretched around a whole block. _I will give you back the music he stole from you._ A new shiny vinyl album every year on his birthday to see him smile, to see him laugh breathlessly, a new soundtrack for dances with the boys. _I will make a place for us in a world that never wanted us in the first place._

_And one day, Kit St.Cloud, I will marry you._

He did, in a big ceremony with all four of their little boys involved.

He kissed away those horrible horrible years, those bloody, unfair and painful years. Smoothing away the barbs and taunts of every person who ever called them sick for daring to love one another.

_I love you, Kit LaCroix._

  
_-_ X-

  
_“They told me love was a fortress_  
_And I had never put it to the test…_

  
-X-

  
Charlie called his little brother for what felt like the eighth time in two days. Frustration bubbling under his skin like lava churning inside a volcano. Finally, he heard a click on the other end of the line as it picked up.

“You sorry little shit, I…”

His tone instantly changed when he heard the sob, his baby brother’s choked off little hiccup before he started full on sobbing, in that awfully quiet way that they all despised. Him and that weird little complex not to let anyone in when he felt like shit. Before Bowie, he had thought smiling through tears was like opening your eyes to sneeze, that it was impossible to do. Charlie was instantly soothing, “Baby boy, are you okay? Beau, I need you to breathe, okay? Breathe with me, _in and out, in and out.”_

It didn’t matter that he was insanely worried or that they were miles upon miles and an ocean apart. Because his baby brother was devastated, and he was programmed to try and fix it. The poor boy was still sobbing hysterically, choking on every other desperate wracking breath, raw and torn to pieces.

“Bowie, what happened? What’s going on? _Breathe_.”

“Charlie—” He gasped for air that wasn’t there. “I did it.”

“You did what, Beau?” His chest was so tight that he could scarcely draw a breath into his own lungs.

“I think I killed what was left of Freddie Mercury.”

  
-X-

  
_“And all the while I relied on this honesty_  
_Well in love we are all amateurs at best…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
“John.” Brian swallowed hard. “ _Deaky…”_

“Look Bri, if this is about the movie, I don’t want to hear it.”

“It’s not… Deaky, I… Can you come? I think I might be losing my mind.”

_I feel like we’ve just lost Freddie all over again._

“ _Please…”_

  
-X-

  
_“You're leaving for your last kiss_  
_And who in this world could ask me to resist…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
The first act of _Anastasia_ was of the Grand Duchess’ former life, a child playing with her loving family, then a girl wracked by war, a woman trapped in a mental hospital. He played different roles depending on the day. Rasputin, Alexei, corp… and once, even Anna herself.

He only danced her once, and he would not dance her again.

A child lost in a world without her memories, instead using the shades of another life to pass off as those memories, to fill the void, a life that may never have existed in the first place. Trapped in a place of gray loss and where beautiful colors lay tattered and stripped away in her wake, piece by piece. Who was she meant to be when it was all gone?

If it had all been little more than a dream? A fantasy?

  
-X-

  
_“Your hands cold as they find my neck_  
_All this love that I've found I detest…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
Beau swallowed hard, worrying his bottom lip with teeth far too small for his mouth.

He tucked and re-tucked his floral blouse into his high-waisted jeans a few times. Breathing hard as he forced himself into that recording booth. His nubby fingernails dug hard into the soft wood of the tiny table in front of him. Closing his eyes to try and abate the nausea that churned in his belly. Opening his mouth to sing his songs felt like slipping a noose around his neck. Walking himself to the gallows.

He wasn’t going to do it, but he’d promised, he had to.

They needed him to sing a couple of the songs on the track and he would’ve done anything for his boys, if they only asked. Especially since he’d just ripped out Roger’s heart and stomped on it. _(It felt like he’d done the same to his own)._

Even if that meant playing a part for a few hours, pretending that every sinew in his body wasn’t ablaze with hellfire.

It was strictly business though, nothing more. After he did this, he’d be gone. It was better that way.

 _Better for who?_ A tiny voice reminded him. _Losing them in both lives, what a winner you are._

“Beau, can you sing something from _Queen I?_ We need an intro piece, anything really.”

He nodded. “I’ve got just the thing, darling.”

Sometimes he just couldn’t help himself. _Because you want them to see you, to know it’s always been you._

_“Yesterday my life was in ruin…”_

He was standing in a parking lot, in a pair of ill-fitting bellbottoms with a corpulent smile on his face and pocket full of crumpled song lyrics, awkwardly scrawled on bits of paper that he used to horde beneath his pillow as a boy. Roger and Brian watching him with lackluster eyes, but that lightened up considerably when he began to sing. He felt like he was dying, but perched just on the cusp of living again.

_“Now today I know what I'm doing…”_

He remembered being young and wild, cold and hungry, curled up between his boys with mold growing on the walls of their rather sketchy apartment and Roger’s fluffy hair in his face. He didn’t need to be rich or a rock legend, not when there was a warm body sandwiched on either side of him.

_“Gotta feeling I should be doing all right.”_

And a Deaky gently shaking him awake to press a steaming cup of tea into his hands, with a little kiss to his temple. _‘Morning, Fred.’_ He‘d rolled his eyes at the nickname that he had always despised from anyone else. _‘Good morning, my love.’_

_“Doing all right…”_

They had always been able to harmonize together, no matter what. But in the recording booth, his powerful booming voice was all he heard, echoing back at him. And that small fact tore him to pieces.

He was little Farrokh Bulsara looking out into the sea, Freddie Mercury singing happy birthday to himself puttering away on a piano, he was the man who sang for the world, the man who loved with his heart wide open, who dared to love himself to death. He was a screaming baby called Anastazy, he was a toddler with honeysuckle curls and an enormous smile. He was the youngest son of Kit and Adamien LaCroix. He was the oldest child and only son of Bomi and Jer Bulsara.

He was Freddie. He was Beau.

Yin and Yang, Push and Pull, two halves of the same whole.

Two sides of the same coin.

Killing one meant killing the other.

He was forever _lost._

Brian’s voice tore him out of his reverie. “That was… that was lovely, Beau. Can you step out for a minute, please? There’s someone here to talk to you.”

Leave? But he’d only just started. He wanted to finish as soon as possible and rip off the bloody bandaid.

“Is it Roger, darling? I don’t think he wants to talk to me. Not after last time. Love, please, this really isn’t the place for another scene.”

But he left the booth anyway, stepped out, shaking out his blonde curls and looking like some sort of scarecrow as he pieced through them, to add a little more definition to the frizzy halo. He did so absently, the headphones had really squashed them.

Of all the people he expected to see crammed into the little control area… well, he wasn’t wrong about Roger, the old Santa Claus looking fool was on the couch, his arms crossed, next to Bri and Anita. Who were both looking at him in something akin to nervousness. Why? They’d both spoken to him before.

But next to the sound guy, an elderly woman took his hand.

“Hello, Beau! We’ve heard so much about you! It’s nice to finally have the pleasure.”

That voice, that face underneath the wrinkles and laugh-lines.

He blinked in shock, mouth popped open. No way, it couldn’t be. That was _impossible._ She and John were in living in suburban bliss somewhere with their dozen kids and a white picket-fence. She wouldn’t be here.

_“…’Ronica?”_

The little nickname slipped out before he could throw up enough barriers to stop it. Because who else could be in front of him but Mrs. Veronica Deacon. Ronnie. Shit.

He had nothing against her, he never had, in fact, she had been one of his closest friends some time ago. It wasn’t uncommon to see him with a few Deacon babies on his thighs and sipping a dry martini with her beside the pool. She made Deaky so bloody happy, it should have been illegal. She was the stability he had always craved. She had looked so lovely on her wedding day, little white flowers and looking at their John like he was her real life Prince Charming, like something out of a fairy tale.

_Oh Ronnie, why are you here?_

Age had been kind to her, she was still just as beautiful as the first time John had introduced them.

“You know who I am?”

Her eyes bloomed with surprise. _Of course, I do._

He nodded slowly, following the trajectory of her eyes as they snapped at attention towards the door. Where someone else was waiting.

_‘I’m so sorry, am I too late?’_

_The brunet with messy tied back hair at his nape, had the sort of big eyes that could have rivaled Roger’s. He had a bass guitar case slung across his back, a homemade amp at his feet and threadbare school uniform socks bunched around his ankles. Here for the audition no doubt. Freddie had popped the pen from his mouth and given a bewitching little smile._

_‘That depends, dear. Can you play that thing, or is it just for the aesthetic?’_

_Nineteen-year-old John Deacon had beamed._

_‘Late again, hm?’ Deaky’s disappointed look had been scathing, when Freddie had shown up late for rehearsal and their studio time for what must have been the ninth time that week. ‘Why am I not surprised? Is Paul in the hallway?’ The disapproval clear in his voice and Freddie had bristled at the high and mighty tone._

_‘And what if he is, darling? Jealous that all of this isn’t yours anymore?’ He’d gestured down at himself in mock-pride. He wasn’t stupid, he knew he looked like shit._

‘ _You look like you haven’t eaten in a week, Fred. Sit down before you fall down.’ Deaky was Deaky, pissed or not he was still the boy who loved him, beneath all the years and veneers. Yet that thought only made Freddie feel sicker. He recoiled from the touch that had once been the thing to set his soul alight._

_‘Deaky, love, please.’ He didn’t deserve to be held by those hands again. He was dirty, unclean. John was anything but._

_Yet his once-lover held him close anyway, breathing him in and Freddie allowed himself to melt into that hold once more._

_Safe and warm._

_Years later, John was the first one to weep, the only one who stayed once the others had gone home to drown their sorrows elsewhere. John had stayed that first night, to pet his hair and spoon him in a way he once had every night. ‘How long have you known?’ Those warm fingers splayed across his belly in a way that made Freddie shiver._

_‘Too_ _long.’_

_He nodded off before long, to John kissing at the back of his neck, the place where his head latched onto his spine. That little divot where he was most vulnerable. Knowing that Deaky would never hurt him. Not like that, not ever._

_John sobbed into the skin, confessing his sins._

_‘I was too late, wasn’t I?’_

“Sorry I’m late, the lift seems to be out of order, and flights of stairs are hard on old bones.”

Beau was frozen, taking in every line and wrinkle, every extra pound and strand of white hair. The plain blue jumper and brown trousers, the pixie curve of his ears. His love who had been an old man at twenty-five. Yet the youngest of them all.

Their eyes met, if only for an instant and he watched the tears well up in his Deaky’s. They were mere feet away and suddenly it felt like an intolerable ocean.

“Hello, _Freddie._ ”

John, who made him curl up and die with only two words.

Two tiny words that made him come apart like a spool of thread.

“How could you _possibly…?”_

He was going to puke, cry, scream. He couldn’t stop staring and his feet moved of their own accord, before he knew what he was doing, his arms were around Deaky’s neck and he was being hugged back within an inch of his life. He could close his eyes and pretend that it was all for naught, that they were both boys again and life hadn’t gone down the shitter. That everything was going to be okay.

“It’s your eyes.”

 _They’re the wrong color, darling._ He wanted to scream but it felt like his tongue had been snipped out of his mouth.

“You’ve always looked at me with the same expression in your eyes. There’s no disguising that.”

For an instant, it was the very first time, their lips brushing in such a way that denoted a curse. A brand of shame. And the truest sort of love. The same kind of new, innocent, soulmate sort of love that he’d only felt for two other people.

“I’m so sorry, Deaky.”

He knew what he had to do.

_I stole everything from you once._

_I shan’t do it again._

  
_-_ X _-_

  
_“Oh please, don't cry, you liar_  
_Oh please, don't cry, you liar…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
Rami Malek was a powder-keg of nerves ready to explode.

Him? Playing Freddie Mercury? It was almost laughable. It had to be a joke. Really, there was no other explanation. He was eagerly awaiting the ghost of the dead frontman to strike him down where he stood. He was a mess. Wringing his hands, bouncing up on his heels as he gawked up at the recording studio. Only to be nearly knocked onto his ass, by a tiny blonde tornado that ran directly into his chest, unseeing.

“Oof!” He staggered back, pinwheeling his arms and nearly brought the kid down with him.

The tiny blonde kid who had the most gargantuan blue eyes, overflowing with tears and looking like his puppy had just died in front of him.

“Aw, jeez, are you alright?”

The boy nodded slowly, using his forearm to rub at his swollen teary face and sniffled pointedly. “I’m fine, dear. I’m so sorry for running into you.”

Rami quickly grabbed the kid’s canvas bag, it had gone flying in the shuffle and the appreciative look on the boy’s face was something that he wished he could have bottled.

“Thanks, what are you here for?”

That voice… Fuck. This possible role and three days straight binging interviews on YouTube was making him lose his mind. Because the kid’s voice sounded just like… but that was impossible. _Wasn’t it?_

“I’m auditioning for a movie.” He laughed nervously and dug a handkerchief out of his pocket for the kid to mop up his eyes.

The sweet-eyed impossible boy acted like Rami had just offered him the key to the city and when he tried to pass the dampened handkerchief back, the actor stopped him with a gentle hand. “No, it’s okay. You keep it. Are you sure you’re okay? Can I do anything?”

A strange wiseness shone in the youth’s visage, glittering in that round charming baby-face of his. The birthmarks were a little odd, but they suited him. The kid tugged a peppermint bracelet off his wrist, a twist of red and white to wrap it around Rami’s own.

“You can go get your role, darling. Good luck.”

A quick little chaste kiss on tiptoe, pressed to his cheek, and instantly that crying boy was running off again. Ducking around the corner in a flutter of the white Royal Ballet hoodie tied around his waist and the staccato beat of his bag against his hip.

Rami was left staring after him, idly playing with the new bracelet on his wrist.

Eyes flicking up towards the heavens, _Was that meant to be your sign? Am I really the right person to do this?_

  
-X-

  
_“But please don't cry, you liar_  
_Oh please, don't cry, you liar…”_

  
_-_ X-

 


	6. Goodbye my lover, Goodbye my friend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ANGST :D Also Features Goodbye My Lover by James Blunt and The Show Must Go On by Queen.
> 
> Thank @universesvisiting on tumblr for EVERYTHING!!!! SERIOUSLY.
> 
> ART!!!!!
> 
> This amazing human @agnosticofgod drew an amazing Baby Beau:
> 
> https://waywardrunawaycherryblossom.tumblr.com/post/181527183336/hey-hey-waywardrunawaycherryblossom-i-drew-an#notes
> 
> And @theoddowldoodle made him a meme <333
> 
> https://waywardrunawaycherryblossom.tumblr.com/post/181502853571/waywardrunawaycherryblossom-heres-a-really-quick#notes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enjoy!

“ _Did I disappoint you or let you down?_  
_Should I be feeling guilty or let the judges frown?_  
_'Cause I saw the end before we'd begun,_  
_Yes I saw you were blinded and I knew I had won.”_

 

A tiny hand shook Adamien’s shoulder while he slept, barely there really. But as a seasoned father of four, he was soon roused by the invasive little touches and the thin longing voice.

“Papa, I can’t sleep.”

The small blonde child was rubbing at his sleepy eyes viciously, whining as he wrapped his tiny fingers around his father’s warm bicep, it took both hands to even come close.

The tired man simply grunted and reached down to scoop his slight son up and into his chest. Little Beau snuggled closer, tucking his head beneath his Papa’s chin, coiling his fingers into the damp kinky curls that grew there. A frantic and busy Kit had already gotten up for work an hour before, so it was just the two of them in the big messy bed.

Just as Damie was starting to nod off again, his little son’s voice cut the still air between them like a knife.

“Papa, do you know what its like to die?”

What little drowsiness he had left, faded completely with those awful words, and he was sitting straight up all at once, displacing his son, who whined at the jolt and roll over. Rubbing at his sleepy eyes, as he yawned widely with those little pink lips of his.

“Why do ask, _mon cœur?”_

Beau shrugged, curling back up with his cheek pressed against the spot that Kit had just vacated, maybe it still smelled like him.

“I do.”

The tiny boy worried at his bottom lip for a moment before. “I remember flying away.” _How was a child meant to explain such things?_

“I could still see everybody, Papa, but I couldn’t make them see me. And I didn’t stay in the same place, I moved around. There were lots of people crying, and I remember bloody handprints on the wall with floral paper, with big yellow sunflowers like the ones I picked out for Brimi. Sometimes it was snowing and sometimes it was hot. There was music and so many people sobbing, enough to fill buckets and buckets. I slept beside each of them for a little while, I held my godson’s hands when he took his first steps. Mary thought he was walking all by himself, but I was holding him up. The babies saw me when nobody else did… Then I flew away again, and I was back.”

He yawned again and blinked sleepily, much of the story omitted from the tiny boy’s sheer lack of words to explain all he had seen, and in general, all he had known in those years before Beau LaCroix and after Freddie Mercury.

He remembered both his last breaths and his firsts.

Damie watched his elfin son sleep, those spun gold fairy curls spread across the rucked sheets and little eyes lined with ghostly tears.

_What could he say? What could he do?_

His precious son with ink-stained fingers and a bewitching smile.

Who had once been someone else’s.

  
-X-

  
_“So I took what's mine by eternal right._  
_Took your soul out into the night._  
_It may be over but it won't stop there,_  
_I am here for you if you'd only care.”_

  
_-_ X-

  
“You _knew.”_

Roger’s voice was the albatross settling back around his neck, his life’s burden, the shame he had to carry for the rest of his days.

Beau stepped away from Deaky with his whole body shaking, _fingers icy and fumbling for purchase, holding tight to the rocky face of a cliff, high above the jagged boulders and rushing rapids below. Screaming desperately for Roger, hoping to see the welcoming worried face of his young lover appear over the horizon, reaching for him. Strong enough to pull him back up, to save him. Instead the Roger that came was the Rog of the present day, still concerned, still reaching out. Only he was leaning too far over the edge with those wrinkled hands of his, far too weak to pull anyone up. A single tug could send them both tumbling down and down into damnation._

_‘Freddie! Take my hand!’_

“No.” Roger was inching closer with every word, struggling to his feet and circling Beau like a shark around its wounded prey, bleeding into the water. “I don’t buy it. You can’t possibly be Freddie. Do you want to know why?”

Beau said nothing, he walked towards the keyboard across the studio instead, probably left behind by the last recording group. His fingers brushing against the keys he had once known so well.

“Freddie would have come to us first. He would have fought to come home, to be with us again. It would have been the first thing out of his damned mouth. We mourned, we cried, we have been grieving for more than two decades and what, that didn’t _matter_ to you? No, _‘Hey guys, turns out I’m alive again’?_ …Did you even care?” The old man’s voice broke and Beau felt his heart do the same. “Freddie would have. And if you’re Freddie… then I don’t think I ever knew you at all.”

_Maybe you did once._

_He reached up his hand, despite his better judgment, and strained for Roger’s own, just a hair’s breadth away._

He played a few bars on the piano, in lieu of the answer he didn’t have, the tension still pulsating between them.

 _“You touched my heart, you touched my soul, you changed my life and all my goals.”_ He was singing, one of his newer songs. One he’d written out on crumpled bits of notebook paper, all while staring at a pill bottle with a name he didn’t understand and couldn’t pronounce, and he hadn’t even realized that he was using his accursed voice until Roger’s hand clamped down hard around his wrist. Spinning him around till they stood eye-to-eye once more, Rog holding onto his arm tight enough to bruise it blue and black.

“You think you’re the only one who deserves to be _angry?”_ He tried to wiggle out of Roger’s hold and shoved himself closer instead, gritting his teeth with wild eyes. “God, I have a _list_ , dear! …You performed and toured the world without me! Like I didn’t matter at all! _‘Oh look, Queen is touring again!’”_ He forced himself forward until they were practically nose-to-nose. “What happened to _‘Queen isn’t Queen without Freddie Mercury’? You sods turned me into a bloody joke! And if not that, then some sort of benevolent ghost watching over you lot! **YOU PRACTICALLY TURNED ME INTO NOTHING AT ALL!”**_

Roger let go then, staggering backwards like he’d just been struck. “Fred, I… We did it for you… You wanted it! You said you wanted us to keep going!” It came out like a sob. One that surprised everyone.

_Wanting something and watching the world move on without you, like you’d never really mattered at all, were two different things._

“I could forgive that though! I did a long time ago!” A wracking breath that made his lungs scream. “That is not your real failing, _Roger Meddows Taylor.”_ Beau spun around to steady himself on the keyboard as he panted through the pain, the keys made an unpleasant screaming noise as he leaned upon them with a force they could scarcely take.

“Brian tried to _kill himself.”_

Even saying the words felt like a yoke tightening around his throat, stealing his breath like he had stolen Bri’s. With a jolt he remembered the yellow floral print wallpaper and the bloody rivulets that dripped down the wall like crimson tears. The man himself winced, from where he sat on the couch, curled forwards with his head pillowed in his hands. Hiding from the world.

“You were meant to take care of him! You were meant to make sure he was alright, and he tried to top himself, you prick! John dropped off the face of the bloody earth! You were supposed to look after each other and you all fell apart!” He was screaming through the tears that fell unheeded down his cheeks, the hysteric laughter that turned into gasping hiccups of rage and desolation. God, all he’d wanted was for them to be alright, even with him leaving them the way he did. All their pain and grief was his fault.

“Why did it have to be _me?”_ Roger was openly crying now, his own hands balled into quivering ruddy fists tinged with veins of white. “Why was I supposed to be the strong one? Why _me_ , Fred!? You were my best-friend, the first person I ever loved! How can you _say_ that to me?!” The once-blonde was hyperventilating and it was only Deaky who kept Roger from crumbling to pieces. Their soft-eyed bassist with cookie-dough eyes, who enveloped Roger into his arms once more, as though they were still boys again and Rog was about to knock some sense into a heckler like the hothead he was.

They held onto each other like a pair of drowning men.

His Roger who Beau had reduced to ashes once more. _I promised my arms would always be there to hold you and now, all I’ve done is reduce you to cinders._

“It wasn't you, my darling.” He caught Roger’s chin from where it rested on Deaky’s shoulder, their eyes looking straight at one another once more. “My angel, my Roggie.” His lips brushed the corner of the older man’s mouth. Still as beautiful as ever. His Roger, who hadn’t properly been his for a lifetime.

“It was me, it was all my fault. I wasn’t there to look after you tossers.” A little wry smile, thinking of the boys he’d abandoned once upon a time and how two decades hadn’t really changed all that much at all.

His heart scarcely dared to beat. “And I think I failed you most of all. All I ever did was fail you.” Admitting it hurt more than swallowing Clorox. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. And I won’t do it again, I won’t!” He was resigned and that was a different sort of blow.

_You finally believe in me, don’t you? In all this?_

_What a fool I’ve been. Thinking I wouldn’t hurt you if I stayed quiet. If I pretended this was okay._ The tears that rolled down those wizened cheeks and dampened the shoulder of Deaky’s jumper were each another high-crime. Proof of all Beau’s misdeeds, each was another strike against his name. _Me just being here, it ruined everything all over again_. _I’m so sorry, Roggie. All I seem to be able to do is muck shit up._

“You won’t _what?”_

Brian had stood up from the couch in all manner of disarray, one of his hands reaching out as if to take hold of Beau’s.

White fingernails, the glint of a wedding ring in the lowlight.

A ring.

For a moment his heart ached for his own, craving the grounding weight on his hand.

Then his mouth was moving of its own accord. “Roggie, do you remember the jade ring? The one we found in the pocket of that bumblebee jacket at the stall?” He still remembered how it looked, the tiniest thing with a surprisingly thick gold band and a teardrop of iridescent jade in the center.

“No.” Roger sniffled and shook that shock of white hair on his head. “We never sold anything like that at the stall, we hadn’t the coin for any of that posh shit. I would have remembered finding something like that.” Rolling his eyes and crossing those tattooed arms of his like a petulant overgrown boy.

“Um, no you wouldn’t have, darling. I’m pretty sure you were perpetually drunk for most of ’69. You wouldn’t have remembered your own name. Remember…? We pawned it to buy…?” He gestured towards Bri and watched the light go on behind those pretty blue eyes.

“Brian’s telescope! The gold plated one! Oh god, we’d waited till the last minute before his birthday… and you tried to convince that bloke who ran the pawn shop, that the thing was made of stolen gold piercings from a lost tribe of Brazilian pygmies or some shit!” They both dissolved into unexpected impromptu laughter. The sound of the laughter felt like falling through time, for them both. Something that had stayed untouched forever. When he laughed he was Freddie Bulsara breaking a microphone stand onstage, and Roger Taylor dying of stifled laughter a few feet away behind his kit. They were a pair of naughty boys again, not men.

“And it would have worked too,” Beau wheezed, laughing so hard that there were tears glittering in the corners of his eyes. “If you hadn’t started bloody laughing halfway through!”

“Wait, you two bought that last minute!? You said you’d been saving for weeks!” Bri squawked and it only made them laugh more hysterically.

“It’s all _Blind Melon Taylor_ ’s fault, he sat on his glasses and needed to get them fixed, so that set us out for weeks.” Maybe if he’d been wearing them instead of being a self-conscious little twat it wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

“It’s not my fault I’ve got weak eyesight! Besides that name died in Montreux.” _Died with you. Along with Liz, Blondie, Roggie, darling, dear, love, Goldie…_

_With you gone, I had to be Rog and Roger again. I lost a part of myself._

Beau walked back towards the piano and settled his bag back against his hip. Fiddling with a few of the keys as he did, _“And love is blind and that I knew when, my heart was blinded by you. I've kissed your lips and held your head, shared your dreams and shared your bed. I know you well, I know your smell. I've been addicted to you…”_

_Goodbye my lovers, goodbye my friends._

“Beau… _Freddie?”_

The tiny blonde looked up with guilty eyes and rushed over to fling his arms around Brian’s middle one more time, breathing him in for just an instant and closing his eyes to play pretend, like the child he never was in his second life. A large hand wrapped as gentle as a butterfly’s wings around the back of Beau’s head, smashing the curls there, but he felt Bri take in a breath for what must have been the first time in more than a decade. _I love you._

“I won’t do it again, Brimi, I can’t.” _I can’t hurt you like I did before. This is why I couldn’t tell you. You’d ask me to stay, you’d want me to stay._

_But I can’t, not when it always ends in heartbreak. If you never try, you never have to fall._

_‘Freddie!’ Roger screamed as he leaned farther over the edge of the cliff’s face to catch those stretched out fingers. ‘Take my hand, you’re going to fall!’ As if he couldn’t see the way his own body trembled, the weakness in the foundation of his hold. Beau wouldn’t pull Roggie down with him. He couldn’t. More than losing Roger, being the cause of Roger’s death, his loss. It would be the ultimate sin._

He stepped away from Brian, loathly pulled himself up and beyond his orbit, meeting Roger’s eyes, a mere instant too late.

“I’m sorry.”

_‘I’m sorry.’_

_In both dream and reality, the once-blonde lunged for him._

_In both dream and reality, he was a second too late._

_In both dream and reality, Freddie let go._

  
-X-

  
_“Goodbye my lover._  
_Goodbye my friend._  
_You have been the one._  
_You have been the one for me.”_

  
_-_ X-

  
“Let go of me, Brian!”

“No! If you run down those steps and break a hip, you’re no use to anyone, Rog!”

“So what are you suggesting we do? Lose Fred again like we lost him to Munich? To that asshole Prenter? Not again Bri, we are not losing him again.”

“No, we aren’t _losing him.”_ Deaky rolled his eyes. “You lot are going to follow me down those steps before he gets too far. Come on.”

  
-X-

  
“ _I am a dreamer but when I wake,_  
_You can't break my spirit - it's my dreams you take._  
_And as you move on, remember me,_  
_Remember us and all we used to be.”_

  
_-_ X-

  
Beau locked the door to his flat behind him, with half a mind to eat and drink his feelings away with Moët & Chandon and Chubby Hubby ice-cream, all while binge-watching old concert bootlegs on YouTube to make himself feel worse.

Instead what he found, was Charlie.

“Okay, so I know ballerinas are supposed to have that thing about not eating… But the only shit in here is some cornflakes, ice-cream, vegan cheese, a tomato and I think a banana, but its fermented and is now growing a second banana…”

His big brother was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the kitchen floor, eating a popcorn-sized bowl of cornflakes with a ladle. Dry. _Oh, Charlie_. _A fucking ladle?_

“Want some? I think Hen’s passed out in your bed after that long-haul flight and Tits is still in the shower.”

Beau just shook that messy towhead, walked to the freezer and dug out a pint of Chubby Hubby, before plopping down with a big spoon.

“Bad day, hm?”

He nodded into the spoonful of ice-creamy goodness that he’d just shoved into his mouth and bit down on it, his teeth were _screaming_.

He blamed the hot fat tears that rolled down his cheeks on that fact alone. Even though they both knew the truth. He closed his eyes as he started to sniffle and cry, quiet and muffled around the huge silver spoon in his mouth. Charlie scooted over and slowly tugged the spoon out of there with a little hum, using the corner of his shirt to wipe his kid brother’s face off.

The tender love and care in the action was enough to make Beau completely breakdown, sobbing brokenheartedly into Charlie’s warm chest, which the older man had predicted and accommodated without complaint, holding the small boy close as he broke into pieces.

The long-suffering big brother didn’t even say anything, just kissed Beau’s forehead now and again, as he hummed the soundtrack to their favorite Disney movie _The Princess and The Frog_. Which he had taken the liberty of queuing up on Netflix and was ready to go on command. _(You know, just in case)_. It was hard to be sad when your tone-deaf older brother was screeching along to _Down in New Orleans_.

“Aren’t you mad at me?” He sniffed, somewhere into Char’s left pectoral.

“Oh I’m furious, you and your dodgy men are going to be the reason I die young. But, screaming isn’t gonna do shit while you’re crying.” He punctuated the statement by pressing another kiss to his little brother’s curly halo.

“I love you, Char.” His fingers curled in and tightened around the fabric of his big brother’s baggie t-shirt.

“Love you too, you little shit.”

  
-X-

  
_“I've seen you cry, I've seen you smile._  
_I've watched you sleeping for a while._  
_I'd be the father of your child._  
_I'd spend a lifetime with you.”_

  
-X-

  
He was just a child when he first saw _Madame Butterfly_.

Watching them dance set something free inside of him. His fathers hadn’t known what the Ballet was about or they wouldn’t have rented the videotape for him, to let their youngest child watch a tragedy unfold in front of his eyes was cruel.

A fifteen-year-old girl forced into the life of a geisha, who pledged her heart to an American naval officer that abandoned her, knowingly forsaking her for another. Watching her love so earnestly and then hold out hope for so long, that her husband would return, touched something deep inside of him. Raising their son all alone with such love and hope for the future. She gave that man her innocence, her childhood. She gave him their son to raise and finally, she gave him her life.

_To die with honor when one can no longer live with honor._

Beau cried for her.

For the girl who loved till it doomed her. Stayed loyal until it earned her a sword to the belly and an empty womb. A child who just wanted to dream and a woman who lost everything because of it.

 _My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies,_  
_Fairytales of yesterday will grow but never die:_  
_I can fly, my friends!_

He cried then, for a boy who had craved love above all else, who loved till it doomed him. The blind man who found that truest form of love so many times over in his years, but who never understood what he had until it was gone.

A Peter Pan who never grew old. A Peter Pan whose body never aged but whose mind lived on. A Peter Pan who could _fly, but chose to fall._

Henri had found him sitting cross-legged in front of the TV in their living room. Staring silently at the paused image of Butterfly holding her father’s sword aloft, knowing her next move would be to plunge it into her own abdomen. Beau wasn’t crying, he didn’t say anything, he just stared unblinking as if in a trance.

“Hey, wake up sleepy head, did you zone-out?”

His brother’s less than delicate touch did little to awaken him from his stupor.

_In his mind, he was sitting at the boughs of one of Garden Lodge’s cherry trees, his cats bunched up and cuddled around his knees. Watching his dear gardener play in the mud and dirtying up those white trousers he loved so much._

_‘What are you doing, love?’_

_Sunshine dappling his own skin and warming his face. Too warm. He used a hand to shade himself and stumbled to his feet when Jim didn’t answer, the Irishman just kept digging away, those sharp muscles moving visibly beneath his shirt. The cats protested Freddie’s every movement, digging those needle claws like pinpricks into his flesh. ‘Darling, are you alright?’_

Henri’s hand brushed against Beau’s face and the little boy’s eyes widened at the unexpected heat.

“Daddy! Papa! Come quick! I think Beau’s sick!”

The younger child still staring away.

_‘Darling?’_

_He neared Jim and could hear the man crying as he dug ever farther into the earth. Deep, hiccuping sobs that made Freddie’s heart ache. ‘Oh dear one, what’s wrong?’ He stopped just short of pulling his weeping husband into his strangely pale and spotted arms, and looked down at the garden. At what was supposed to be the tulips._

_At what was instead, his half-buried corpse._

_His own skin pitted and raw, bits of flesh pulling off the bones as though it had just been flayed. His eyes glassy and empty, his mouth gaping and his grotesque teeth looking even more so when his lips had rotted away._

_‘Freddie’s dead…’ Jim whimpered beside him._

Kit’s arms wrapped around his youngest son, pressing a gentle kiss to his brow and recoiling at the unexpected heat there. “Shit, Damie he’s burning up.” Both their eyes met with an unspoken command of _ER, now._

Amid the foray, someone unpaused the TV. Butterfly’s sword met its mark.

_The corpse Freddie in Beau’s head, turned its face sharply out of nowhere, smiling its grotesque mockery of a grin. Roaches and bloody masticated flesh falling out in black carrionous clumps once it unhinged its jaw._

_‘Murderer.’ It hissed._

_Its disembodied lower jaw hit the dirt._

Beau screamed, the sound was shrill and blood-curdling.

Damie quickly turned off the TV with a gasped. _“Oh God!”_

While Kit tried to hush their screaming little boy, screeching at the top of his tiny powerful lungs and sobbing without end. “Shush, shush, it’s okay, baby boy. It’s okay, angel. It was just a movie. Everything’s okay. We’re gonna get you medicine to make you feel better.” He bundled his baby out of the house, Damie herding the rest of their little ones like little ducklings behind them.

Those big pacific blue eyes still seeing a world that wasn’t there.

  
-X-

  
_“I know your fears and you know mine._  
_We've had our doubts but now we're fine,_  
_And I love you, I swear that's true._  
_I cannot live without you.”_

  
_-_ X-

  
It was late and he was exhausted, having watched old music videos on loop for hours.

Including the videos that they’d shot in the snow so long ago, when he was blazingly wasted. Beau was fairly sure that he’d puked in a bush or two… or _three_. The vodka made for quite the trip.

His dry eyes burned and he stood shivering, dressed in a silky blue chiffon robe tied loosely over his tight teeny tiny red boxers, so pretty far from the right state to meet anyone in and yet the knocking on his door would not abate. The tiny blonde grumbled endlessly as he walked over, too short to peer into the peephole, so he simply leaned bodily against the door like a dead fish and bitched over the threshold. “Who are you? What do you want?” He moaned.

“Beau, can you let us in?”

Brian’s voice in its lilting gentle cadence was enough to make the blonde want to bury his face in a throw-pillow and scream his frustrations away.

“Please? We have to talk about this, really talk about it.”

_We already talked about it. I’m going back to bed._

Only, he didn’t. He flopped back onto the couch and glared at the door with all he had in him. They didn’t leave. Of course they didn’t leave. He heard Rog shout as much through the door, probably wagging his fist about like some sort of crotchety old man trying to shoo _‘those rapscallion children’_ off his lawn. Instead, they hunkered down right outside the door, calling his bluff. Three old fools, who ended up sleeping on his doormat.

“I hate you three, so goddamn much.”

I _love you three, so goddamn much._

He only managed to hold-out until about two am, before he stumbled over to the linen closet, grumbling all the way and carried out what felt like a mountain of pillows and blankets. Dragging them over to his old tossers without hesitation, crunched as though they were, sleeping in front of his flat. Their backs would give them hell in the morning he was sure of it. But they certainly wouldn’t be getting hypothermia on his watch.

Brian was sitting up, partially slumped over like he’d nodded off mid-sentence. Roger was under his arm, pillowed by Maggie’s middle and the cold hard ground. Deaky looked like he’d just given up and curled up on a mix of Bri’s thigh and Roggie’s shin. Quite a motley crew, shivering away where they lay. Or at least they _were_ , until Beau tucked each of them in, shoving pillows around to make it more comfortable.

Before finally curling up himself, in the dead center, he was lulled to sleep by the rapid cacophony of their breathing.

It was the best rest he’d had in years.

***

“Owww… Jesus Christ, my back _hurts.”_ Roger whined into the stifling darkness of the walkway.

Brian groaned. “Your back _always hurts.”_

“Well yes, but I usually don’t _sleep on the ground_ , Brian! I’m not you, I don’t sleep in my garden with the trees, animals and fresh dirt.” _Like some sort of bloody woodland nymph._

“Oh, so I suppose just stealing Freddie is enough for you then. Got a nice view from your bedroom?” The bitterness had not faded and it likely never would. Welcome to fifty years of grievances, the tired and bitchy old men edition.

“Stealing Fred—? The _statue!? Brian it was two years ago.”_ He sounded incredulous, but it was all his fault really, he had no right to get all uppity.

“I was on vacation Rog, you could have waited.” The guitarist sniffed.

“Yeah, well you didn’t exactly tell me Freddie was alive and kicking again, now did you? _No_ , you waited to give me a _heart attack at a bloody concert! I could have died!”_

“Oh please, your ticker is fine.” Cue the token eye-roll. “Besides, you didn’t exactly believe me anyway! You thought it was all a trick! A ruse!”

“Yes, because _reincarnation_ is always my go-to answer, Bri.”

John simply rolled his eyes to the heavens, asking for strength, because once again, as usual, they had neglected to notice what was right in front of them.

The once-bassist snugly tucked another blanket around Beau’s lithe form and wrapped his arm around the youth to warm him, before nodding off again, letting the two old queens bitch at each other until they realized, while he got some much needed sleep.

***

Beau only woke up once during the night, somehow close enough to Rog for the once-blonde to be carding his fingers through his curly mop-top.

His first reaction was _Holy fuck, you selfish prick, you had one goddamn job._ So of course he tried in vain to wriggle up and away.

Instead he was quickly and efficiently tugged back down again. Roger had tightened both those strong tattooed arms around his waist, Deaky still had a hand on his hip, grounding even in slumber and Bri’s knee absentmindedly locked around his thigh. He was trapped, but it was same sort of _trapped_ he remembered being in near-constantly, back when they were recording a _Night at The Opera_ at Ridge Farm. He couldn’t count on one hand or even both, how often he ended up trapped between his boys in bed, all three of them laughing sleepily as he tried to free himself or moaning piteously when he succeeded.

_‘Freddie, stay…’ Bri would whine, not fully cogent and groping at empty air. His beard growing in with a vengeance. Sometimes Freddie really hated that beard, as it often denoted such sadness in Bri, the melancholia and depression that would afflict him so viciously, when he felt lonely or lost._

_Roger would pout, ‘Leave in the morning, for now… sleep.’_

Beau sleepily blinked up at Bri, at the white snowy stubble prominent enough to show on his cheeks. _Oh, Maggie. My sweet, Mags. I’ve hurt you even more now, haven’t I? Why is everything I do so wrong?_

Roger, still half-asleep, merely growled. “You can run again in the morning, for now… _sleep_.” For once in his second life, Beau even obeyed.

Closing his demanding pacific blue eyes again.

***

He was gone again by the time his boys woke up.

  
-X-

  
_“I'm so hollow, baby, I'm so hollow._  
_I'm so, I'm so, I'm so hollow.”_

  
-X-

 

 


	7. They just hovered 'round his tomb

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Features: Walking in Memphis by Marc Cohen AND THE BEGINNING OF A SAGA ENTITLED: 'Who and what is that blonde kid?' by THE BO RHAP BOYS. 
> 
> (ALSO NEXT CHAP: The confrontation when the old folks go inside the apartment woo boy. It's a trip ;))
> 
> Thank you so much for enjoying this, it means the world. <3333
> 
> Also features a quote from Bustle about Jim Hutton: https://www.bustle.com/p/what-happened-to-jim-hutton-freddie-mercurys-longtime-partner-steps-into-the-spotlight-in-bohemian-rhapsody-12806967

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MORE ART WIZARD STUFF!!!! (Honestly, I'm still so surprised people like this thing :DDD). 
> 
> @theoddowldoodle !!!!!
> 
> https://waywardrunawaycherryblossom.tumblr.com/post/181679091721/ying-and-yang-finally-got-enough-space-in-my#notes
> 
> +memes!!!
> 
> https://waywardrunawaycherryblossom.tumblr.com/post/181695618356/two-memes-that-embodies#notes
> 
> @niamhseren11 !!!!
> 
> https://waywardrunawaycherryblossom.tumblr.com/post/181629320026/so-i-dont-usually-post-my-drawings-on-tumblr-but#notes
> 
> YOU GUYS ARE SO AMAZING I JUST DON'T DESERVE!!!!

_“Saw the ghost of Elvis_  
_On Union Avenue…”_

 

 

“Hey _faggy!”_

A twelve-year-old Beau LaCroix stiffened at the shout, his tiny fists clenching almost unconsciously _(thumbs tucked safely outside each so they wouldn’t break on contact)._ It was a slur he’d heard many a time before in his previous life, so his reaction was almost on reflex.

Only this time, to his great amazement, it wasn’t addressed to him at all. _(No Roger at his side to go to war with, no Brian to pull him away, and no Deaky to talk some sense into all of them)._

Later on, he would realize that he looked butch enough for a little kid back then, clad as he was in his oversized t-shirt and daisy-duke shorts.

It was instead directed towards an unsuspecting Baptiste, walking alongside him with a pair of pink skinny jeans, oversized grandpa sweater and scuffed red converse. Far from being out of place in the burgeoning hipster culture of New Orleans. Maybe it was the lavender hair and earrings that provoked it.

“Oi, _batty boy!_ We’re talking to you!”

The same venomous clutch of assholes from a nearby pub tailed them for nearly a block and a half, before Baptiste furtively grabbed Beau by the narrow shoulders. His big brother looked almost _scared_ by the impending confrontation. _(He knew it was coming, they both did)._ Those dangerous eyes locked with his, as if in warning. “B, run ahead, okay?” _Get away from here as fast as you can._

 _Hell no._ The rebuttal came as quick as breathing to his lips, but Baptiste still shoved him ahead, spinning around and painting up a big smile on his face, a rotting jack-o-lantern that couldn't be cut into. “Hello boys!” Falsely chipper. “Now I don’t want any trouble, I was just walking home, see?”

His big brother had no right to be so _afraid._

Baptiste, who still slept with him sometimes during the really bad nights. Never minding the fact that the older boy never got any real sleep of his own, even before important dates and tests that he should've been rested for. Still he would crawl exhaustedly into a too-small bed to hold his younger brother while he wept, humming and kissing at that fuzzy blonde hairline to soothe away his imagined hurts.

Beau grit his teeth and clenched his fists so hard, that he dug his painted fingernails into the delicate flesh there, maybe an inch or two away from drawing blood. His eyes locked in on the biggest bloke, who seemed intent on doing _something_ with that beer bottle that his clout ass had broken over a nearby ledge.

The same asshole who dared to use those jagged glass edges to poke Baptiste in the exposed shoulder. _(Stop that! He's fragile, you arsehole! Wait till I make you swallow that glass)._

“Well, you’d better hurry along then, _boy._ ” But contrary to those words, he didn’t let the teenager go. Instead the asshole started to twirl the neck of the bottle that he held, so that the broken bit dug even harder into the unprotected flesh there. Poor Baptiste had the _audacity_ to whimper at the sensation and flinch away. Appropriate grounds for the asshole to punch Beau’s ever-loving pacifistic big brother _right in the mouth._

The tiny blonde demon was running long before he was consciously aware of such a thing.

The way his big brother cried out in unadulterated pain, a torrent of blood and the few odd chunks of his cheeks pouring out past his lips and into his cupped hands.

Baptiste was lucky that he didn’t have a broken jaw or lose any teeth in the scuffle.

The asshole had the nerve to look at the blood and cringe away. “Careful boys, the queer might have _AIDS.”_

All the more justification for Beau’s running leap and the way he tore into that wanker as though he’d never stopped boxing at all.

Apparently he’d also been screaming at the top of his lungs with every blow, in a way that sent the other assholes running and tripping over themselves to avoid discovery and his own victim thrashing about in horror. Beau tore out huge bits of greasy hair with just his teeth. Pummeling that face till his tiny fists found traction. Using his nails as razorblades to make mince-meat out of pitted cheeks. The guy tried to spin around and knock him off, but Beau wasn’t going anywhere until he’d gouged most of the smirk off that asshole’s smarmy bigoted face.

Baptiste was sitting askew, legs all akimbo on the pavement and his hands cupping a veritable puddle of blood, as he gaped at his tiny brother assaulting a man roughly five-times his size.

It was lucky for the bigot that they lived in New Orleans of all places, helpful shopkeepers and painted troubadours were the only reason he didn’t get beaten into unconsciousness. They managed to peel Beau off of him, shrieking bloody war-cries with those powerful lungs of his, after getting in a few good punches in themselves. Really should’ve picked a different city to be an asshole in.

“ _Easy_ , Tiger!”

The kind-eyed old man from the corner soda-shop, set a feisty Beau back on his feet, tiny speckled fists still ablazing. His mind lost in that place between both his lives.

Where he would’ve knocked a grown man’s lights out for underestimating him or talking shit to somebody he loved. The flamboyant buck-toothed boy who had learned to box to protect himself at a foreign boarding school, where he could scarcely speak the language or fit in, no matter how hard he’d tried. The tiny blonde boy who used those skills to protect his brothers and would do it a dozen times over at the slightest provocation.

He would have even launched himself back into the fray once more, if it hadn’t been for the pointed moans from Baptiste, the teenager still holding his bloody mouth and grinning despite it.

“JB,” Beau was over there in an instant, holding his big brother’s chin in his tiny hands, body still shaking with oodles of adrenaline. “Are you okay? Shit, dear, you’re bleeding all over and I… _I don’t_ …”

The older boy shushed him, holding onto Beau’s face instead, complete with its blood, tear-tracks and trembling lip. The achingly gentle touch of those thumbs pulled away dripping in red. It was the first time the younger boy realized that he was bleeding at all.

He jumped back the moment that thought registered in his head, falling backwards on his bum, fear burning low in his belly. His first instinct was to cover up, to scrub away the lingering traces of his blood on Baptiste’s hands, to protect his darling brother from those toxic fluids that still lay in wait inside of him. _(Or at least, they still did in his mind)._

“JB, _I_ can’t… _You_ can’t…” His voice broke and turned into low whimpers, the brands of a 1980s leper still streaked across his skin. Marks that he could never wash away. Indelible ink on his soul.

But his big brother always knew what to say, even when the blood pooled like syrup in his mouth and oozed down his chin.

“It’s okay, baby boy. You’re _okay._ It’s all going to be okay.” Pressing another kiss to Beau’s curls and his forehead, precariously near to a bloody laceration that rested there.

Their fingers intertwined and Beau never wanted to let go.

Even hours later, when their insane and enormously oversized family ran out into the streets to chase down all the remaining bigots in one huge angry mob, with Charlie leading the charge, still in his dorky snorkeling pajamas of course. Beau held onto Baptiste for all he was worth. Anchoring himself in the present once more, through any way necessary.

Damie had simply sighed as he mopped up his bleeding sons’ faces. A sleepy Henri holding up the supplies and passing them over when prompted, a fledgling trauma nurse in the making.

Poor Adamien LaCroix wondered why he only had one son that had inherited his common sense.

“Papa, did Dad run out to join the mob? Is that why he grabbed the lamp?” Leaving the decorative shade discarded at their feet, the remaining stand actually made a surprisingly good javelin. _Who knew?_

“Yes, son, that’s why.”

“Why did Grandmére bring all that rum?” The woman had literally dragged out a cart.

“Oh, she’s just _summoning the spirits._ It’s always a good idea to bring back up to a brawl, boys. Don’t ever forget that.” _Never go in unprepared._ But as he sopped up what felt like a quart of blood from Beau’s nose, he reconsidered his timing.

“Yes, Papa.” They all chorused in unison, obedient _for once._

  
-X-

  
“ _Followed him up to the gates of Graceland_  
_Then I watched him walk right through…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
_“One person who knew Mercury best was his longtime partner, Jim Hutton…_

_Unfortunately, Hutton is no longer with us. While Hutton, like Mercury, suffered from HIV, the disease was not his cause of death. (Mercury died due to complications from AIDS in 1991.) Instead, it was lung cancer that took Hutton's life, and the Irish native died at the age of 60 on New Year's Day, 2010, according to Irish Central.”_

Jim died just days before his own birthday.

Died believing that his heart was waiting for him in another place, in another world.

Instead, that tell-tale heart was beating once more in the _same world_ , enveloped in the chest of a fearful teenage boy, who learned that his husband had died from a Google search when he was fourteen years old, in the middle of a High School English class.

Beau LaCroix had stood up, staring at his phone screen in horror.

“Mr. LaCroix, sit down!” His teacher had sneered, glaring at him from his position of power up at the chalkboard. Beau hadn’t even given a quarter of a shit. He’d staggered out of his seat, running for the door like a bat out of hell. Sobs ripping free from his lips before he could smother them, tears blurring in his eyes and his sneakers squeaking on the overly clean linoleum floor. _“Mr. LaCroix!”_

Beau tripped a few times, falling on his hands until they bruised all colors of the rainbow.

_Rainbow, Rainbow, they'd performed at The Rainbow. They used to call Roger 'Rainbow', because he'd dressed like a fashion disaster at the best of times._

His mouth felt gritty and his heartbeat whooshed along in his ears.

A helter-skelter tambourine. 

He tore out of that building and down the street, wailing like a keener from the olden days, one who could be hired to publicly wail and grieve for a wealthy family’s death. Perhaps the banshee's genesis. His screams were deafening to his own ears, raw enough to tear his throat to bits. Alas, it was New Orleans, so no one gave a shit about the stricken boy, and he was able to find his way home without the ability to see where he was going, through his waterfall of salty stinging tears. Somehow that only made him sob harder. He wondered what he'd forgotten from his old life to make room for that memory. Surely with everything he learned for Beau, every moment he _was_ Beau, was another moment he lost as Freddie. It felt as though, the more he lived as Beau LaCroix, the farther he was from being Freddie Mercury.

He hit his knees once he reached their concrete front-porch, using the twisted iron bar railing to help him sink to the floor, crying loudly, _fully,_ with everything he had. No room for him to hide. No one to hide for. _What did he have left? What was the point of anything at all?_

_Oh God, Jim. I’m so sorry._

_I’m so so sorry, my love._

_Thank you for loving me, my dear. I wish I could have been better_.

_I wish I could have been better for everyone._

  
_-_ X-

  
“ _Now security they did not see him_  
_They just hovered 'round his tomb…”_

  
-X-

  
Kit couldn’t stop wringing his own shirt, twisting it around and around until it threatened to cut off the circulation.

“Mama Delia?”

His mother-in-law paused in her dutiful ministrations, peering at him through the near insurmountable foliage of her garden. “Kitten? How is the little _bijou?”_ The young man paused, furrowing his brow in confusion.

“How did you know that I…?”

“Was coming about the little one? My son is many things, Kitridge, but he is not subtle when he’s scared.” Instead of using a tool or a trowel, she used her wizened hands to manipulate the dirt below them. Then pulled Kit down beside her to do the same, creating new life with their bare hands. She grew most of her own herbs and incenses, everything she needed for her Voodoo and Hoodoo practices, right alongside her round ripe tomatoes and peonies.

They spent hours out there, not saying a word, before he finally managed to force the real questions out.

“I don’t know much about Voodoo or what’s in your power or isn’t.” She sat back quietly, regarding him in a sharp way not often attributed to those her age. His voice was wavering thin, as he clenched his fists, pressing them hard into his bent knees. “But, could you take them away? His memories of the past?” Just asking for such a thing made the young father feel _sick_.

But he’d had these worrisomely prophetic nightmares for as long as the memories had started to come unheeded from his baby boy’s cherry-red mouth. Tiny angelic Beau, lying on the floor of a shitty motel, with a needle full of uncut heroin sticking out of his arm, Janis Joplin’s death painted all over his child. Then it was a bloody hole on the side of his head, a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Kurt Cobain’s death mirrored in his son’s glassy crystalline blue eyes.

Perhaps the memories would be the thing to pull him under.

The AIDS of Beau LaCroix’s lifetime.

All Freddie’s mistakes turned into his young child’s tattered banner to wave, dragging it along like Linus’ blanket, a tiny boy with a man’s burden to carry. A prologue to the white flag of surrender, held aloft when those shadows finally drowned him, overtook him and dragged him six feet under, kicking and screaming.

Kit’s child, his kind, loving, _innocent_ child. Who didn’t deserve such tribulations, trials or pain.

No one should ever be forced to remember their own demise and every mistake leading up to it.

His poor little boy who had spent a childhood grieving for the _loves of his life_ that he’d never _met_ in this one. 

Kit would so often run over to comfort his weeping child, only to see a dead man’s visage looking back at him from a little boy’s round teary face.

“He would not be your _son_ anymore. He would not be _Beau_ anymore, _mon chou._ He would be someone else, _something_ else.”

_Oh, Mama. What could be worse than this?_

  
_-_ X-

  
“ _But there's a pretty little thing_  
_Waiting for the King…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
Beau pushed open his front door with all the courage he could muster, which wasn’t all that much to be honest, dressed in a pair of tight pink corduroy pants and one of Brian’s old tour shirts from ’93.

He tossed a long-sought bottle of paracetamol into Roger’s lap and shrugged as he leaned back against the doorframe, trying to avoid the splinters. “You wanted to talk, lovies. Let’s talk.” He sounded pointedly _less than thrilled_ as he sunk down to his bum. Focusing on anything and everything but the panel of judges sitting before him.

“How long have you known?”

The question came from a strangely subdued Roger, as he coughed into a fist around the chalky pills that he’d just dry-swallowed, handing the white bottle over to Bri. The once-blonde was still grumbling under his breath about his sore back, the one that had to still be paining him. Although they’d slept in far weirder places in their youth, far more uncomfortable places.

For a moment, Beau smiled, remembering what it was like to be a twenty-something going nowhere, with the world at his fingertips and yet everything he’d wanted sitting just out of reach.

“Known what? Who I am?” He huffed a little laugh without the mirth. “Darling, I never _forgot.”_

He took in a long shuddering breath that reverberated inside his skull, as he reached out to take Brian’s hand without really thinking about it.

Just before the contact however, he froze, his fingers curling back up towards his palm instead. Or they _would_ have, if Brian hadn’t closed the space between them in one fell and ever-so-predictable move. Wrapping those long spindly fingers around his own hand, the one that looked and felt so tiny in comparison.

“Bri, I know this is hard to believe. And I don’t have an explanation to give you, I’ve been looking for one for years and I haven’t found it yet.” _Perhaps you can find the science to explain this, Maggie May. I never could._

He tucked a particularly errant curl behind his ear and blinked surreptitiously. “But I don’t blame any of you for being _mad_ at me, or for being _upset_ at everything that’s happened—“ He was cut off by a pointed grunt.

Deaky refused to let him go on, because of course he didn’t. He was _Deaky._

“ _Stop.”_ His beautiful bassist looked genuinely surprised, genuinely shell-shocked, like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Stop. _Freddie_.” God, that word from his lips was agony incarnate and it felt like having acid gushing about in his veins instead of blood. “You don’t really think we’re _mad_ at you, do you? For _what? Dying?_ ”

At the mere mention of the word, Brian’s hand clenched tight around his own. As if he feared letting go.

Beau looked directly at Deaky for a moment, John who was in his sixties, but still managed to look just like that dough-eyed boy who’d needed someone to look after him in the beginning. Though that phrase was so often a misnomer. He and Deaky’s relationship was so often misconstrued. Yes, he had looked after the bassist in social situations, where he wasn’t always at his best. John had always found it a fair bit easier to talk and be sociable, with a bright little limpet hanging off his hip. But Deaky had looked after him as well. How often had that boy poured him back into bed after a rough night, with a kiss on the temple and tucking in his covers, all nice and warm?

His life wouldn’t have been his _life_ without Deaky in it.

Deaky, who had always managed to see him at only his best and worst of times.

So when he looked directly at John, the mask had slipped for a moment.

He wasn’t a flippant, devil-may-care diva in that instant.

He was a living, breathing _corpse_.

But as soon as John had caught a flicker, it was gone and Beau was worrying at his bottom lip with a Stepford smile. A nasty habit he’d sported in both his lives, though as Freddie it had certainly been easier. _(Not the smile, the lip biting, his smiles as Freddie had been genuine, had been happy)._

“Fred, your death wasn't _your fault_.” John whispered it, like the words themselves were taboo and neither Roger nor Brian dared to draw in a breath, once they were said. Something like tears playing peekaboo in his eyes. _Freddie._

“I know _that,_ dear.” He waved his arm around like dispelling bad spirits and blinked the tears out of his own eyes, lest his old bandmates spot them shining there. “And of course I don’t think that. What sort of fool do you take me for?” _Yes, lie to the people who know all your tells._

The familiar: _Don’t call me Fred, it’s Freddie_ , burned on his lips as well, but he didn’t say it. He couldn’t really bring himself to care anymore. _Just happy not to be alone._

“Do you remember it?” Brian was tracing what felt like grand constellations on the birthmarks on the outside of Beau’s hand. But his hold tightened indiscriminately when the words finally came.

“Death?”

Beau’s voice was quiet, spun-sugar and he looked at his Maggie May with the saddest eyes. _Yes. Everyday. I can’t sleep with a blanket over my face or a teddy bear in my hands. I can’t stand small spaces or the dark. I’m terrified of needles. I remember taking my last breath, unable to draw in another. I suffocated, Brimi. I felt my heart beat away into nothingness. I still have nightmares._

“No. Just waking up into a new life.” _It’s better if you don’t know, my love._

Brian looked so _relieved_ , and Roger promptly dragged the tiny blonde over and into his lap. Depositing him firmly between his thighs and pressing his bristly face into Beau’s curls. Which probably still smelt of booze, asphalt and bad decisions, but _eh_. It was Roger’s way of apologizing for all the yelling the day before, it was how they used to apologize to each other back then too. With a cuddle and a smile. _A promise of better days to come._

He twisted backwards as though he were going in for a backbend, so that he could catch Rog’s big blue eyes without changing his position.

“We’re _alright_ then, Roggie?”

The once-blonde drummer cleared his throat with a sharp nod, hiding his face in Beau’s fluffy halo of hair again. “Yeah, we’re alright.” Still holding tight like he was never going to let go again.

Beau hummed in contentment, as he leaned back and focused on the warmth of Roger, the weight of Brian’s hand in his, the tone of Deaky’s breathing. He felt at peace for the first time in a long time. Properly at peace.

“I missed you, my three weepy little girls.”

_I’ve been missing you for all of this life._

  
_-_ X-

  
“ _Down in the Jungle Room.”_

  
_-_ X-

  
Beau stepped forwards, sweat beading his brow like a circlet and still dressed in his damp barre warm-up clothes.

His current Ballet Master, Emilie Patrova, had called him forwards, along with two other male principals: Diego and Sonny, both of which he’d danced with many times before. The pint-sized elderly man before them, clapped his hands together with a wicked grin. “As you all know, our new season’s work shall be _Peter Pan_ , a variation choreographed by yours truly. Playing Peter will be the three men you see before you: _Samson, Diego and Beauregard._ ” Each of them did a little bow as their names were called. Beau resisted the urge to roll his eyes and bit down hard on his tongue. _Of course it would be Peter Pan. Of course he would be a Peter._

Patrova flashed one of his token shark smiles and batted his dancing eyes as he regarded the rest of the company in front of him, as well as several of the graduate students from the upper school. Apprentices, only a year or two younger than he.

“Why did I choose Samson?”

The old man clapped Sonny on the back, prompting the older principal dancer to roll his eyes. He was the oldest out of all of them, nearing his thirties, near-ancient for the ballet community.

Nobody answered, until one of the newer corp girls tentatively raised her hand. “Experience?”

Everyone nodded in agreement, including Patrova. “Yes. Samson is experienced, he has danced Peter before. He knows the ballet and he is reliable. Now,” A clap on Diego’s shoulder. “Why Diego?”

The young man’s muscles practically rippled at the contact.

“Strong.” Yvette spoke up, looking Diego up and down with an appreciative sort of grin. He knew that look in her eyes and stifled the urge to roll his own once more. But he couldn’t exactly blame her either. He too had often admired Diego. Especially when they were paired together and no one could blame him if his hand slipped across those creamy cafe au lait muscles.

Patrova nodded, “Experienced, strong, both very good qualities. And now,” His eyes made Beau’s spotted skin prickle. “Why Beauregard?”

Goodness, he still hated his full first-name with a passion.

Nobody said anything for a good long while.

But finally Olga, a recent transplant from the Bolshoi, a young soloist who always looked a little too wise for her age, finally sighed. “His eyes. At first I thought it was his youth. He looks like the child that Peter is supposed to be. But it isn’t that, not _just_ that anyway. You said that half of a character’s story is in the eyes alone. Beau has a man’s eyes in a boy’s face, just like Peter would have.”

_The child who was never allowed to grow up._

_Welcome home, Lost Boy._

  
-X-

  
_“Now Muriel plays piano_  
_Every Friday at the Hollywood_  
_And they brought me down to see her…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
The blonde flounced into the velvety conference room without bothering to knock, he had his canvas bag haphazardly slung over one shoulder and one of those inconveniently-folded paper drink cartons held in the hand of the other.

Without even glancing at the other people in the room, he zeroed in on his former bandmates and eagerly wiggled himself into Brian’s plush open lap. His favorite spot. Passing the steaming drinks off to a waiting Roger, the beverages dressed-up to the usual specifications, sipping from his own mess with one quirked eyebrow and a quick little chaste kiss to Bri’s clean-shaven cheek. Then a little slap when the old man shifted around in his chair, with mock moans at Beau’s supposed _heaviness. Please._

Santa Rog took a sip and made an appreciative little hum at the taste. His eyes even fluttered closed and he paused for an instant in pure bliss, like he’d popped his finger into a spicy packet of fun-dip/cocaine mix and sucked it off.

( _They’d certainly been to a few wild parties back in the day)._

Then, Beau regarded the other occupants of the room for the first time and was surprised to see a familiar face and a familiar bracelet among them. That boy he’d bumped into outside the studio was sitting with three other young men, his eyes bright like threads of lightning in a cloudy sky, shot in recognition. But neither of them said anything at first, just _stared_ as Bri introduced them with a brief clearing of his throat.

“Everyone, this is Beau.” Brian’s curly head leaned against his arm for a moment and Beau had to squash the sudden burst of affection in his chest. “Love, these are a few of the actors for our movie, _Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, Joe Mazzello and Rami Malek.”_ Each raised their hand in a greeting, a bit like an assembly line. The last hand raised was adorned with the same peppermint-striped bracelet that he himself had wrapped there that infamous day. The smile was _instinctive_ , he had to force himself not to cover it up with a free hand. Instead, he used that hand to wave.

“So you got the part then, _Rami?”_

He cheekily chirped, batting those big eyes of his.

“Why yes, I think I did, _Beau.”_

The little smile on that angular face was so cute, but Beau could also see the concern alight in those dark eyes, the little thrill of:  _I’m glad you’re feeling better. Are you alright?_

He’d practically dissolved into tears in that boy’s arms, after all. Not his finest moment.

Roger’s brow was furrowed as his sharpened gaze flicked between them. “Do you two know each other?”

Beau dismissed the thought with a wave of his hand, rolling his own eyes as he smiled. “Oh _of course,_ darling. But that’s not my issue here.” He turned back to the boys and focused on the beautiful blonde between Gwilym and Joe. “Ben, dear, however much they’re paying you, it isn’t _enough_. It’s all just for vanity's sake, my love. Although I'm sure you're a bloody good actor, our Roger was a bloody noodle during the 70s. While you my darling, look like Michelangelo’s _David._ ”

“Oi!” Roger squawked, voice high as could be, and Beau was reminded of several _Galileos_ in a barn once upon a time.

Sometimes his boys made him so happy, it was like swallowing a shot of straight whiskey, a burn that lasted in his chest long after it was gone. _A bit like his life for everyone else._

He laced his hand with Brian’s, without even thinking about it, laying them intertwined on the table, white nails and black wrapped together again. The black actually went quite well with his suspenders, black leather booty shorts and crop-top. Even if he had gotten some rather perturbed looks on the tube. But _hey_ , it wouldn’t be the first time. He’d once made the mistake of getting aboard in performance clothes, dead pointe shoes, black leotard and a gossamer baby pink shawl fluttering about his waist, rolling like the billows of a cloud. He’d been teaching a few variations of _Sleeping Beauty_ to the lower level classes that day and was running behind because of it.

Teaching _Aurora_ and then _Carabosse_ had been quite the experience.

The innocent girl who slept a hundred years for her curiosity and naivety.

Then the vengeful creature who had cursed her for the sins of another.

A tale as old as time itself.

He never knew how to dance the roles of the _Prince_ , who found her and her kingdom lost to the sands of time, he who was melancholy and alone until she was there, nor the role of the _Lilac Fairy_. The savior who protected her while she slept and reworked the curse to tell a different tale.

To have another end.

For girl who was meant to die, to live another life.

  
-X-

  
“ _And they asked me if I would_  
_Do a little number_  
_And I sang with all my might…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
All the while, a concerned Joe Mazzello deftly unlocked his phone's screen underneath the conference table and Googled, after a furtive look at the pretty blonde kid sitting his perky bum on Brian May’s lap and his feet strewn across Roger Taylor’s: _How to spot a Sugar Baby???_

Ben’s eyes widened when he saw it, mouth sliding half-open in surprise, and Joe could only shrug. _What other explanation was there? The kid was obviously cute and they certainly had the money for it!_

Poor Gwilym resisted the urge to plug his ears and brain himself on the glass table.

  
-X-

  
“ _She said_  
_"Tell me are you a Christian child?"_  
_And I said "Ma'am, I am tonight.”’_

  
_-_ X-

 


	8. On all the ashes in my wake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ANGST! (The usual). <3333 And today's contenders for Who Is That Blonde Kid? ...... Stripper and Freddie's Long-Lost Son!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Features: In My Defence by Freddie Mercury/Dave Clark and Arsonist's Lullabye by Hozier
> 
> :DDDD

_“When I was a child, I heard voices_  
_Some would sing and some would scream_  
_You soon find you have few choices_  
_I learned the voices died with me.”_

 

  
_He’d told Phoebe on a Thursday night._

_After his dearest Jim had fallen asleep in a plush chair beside the bed, set aside for that very purpose, looking ever-so tired and rumpled in his pajamas (a birthday gift from what felt like a century ago), seemingly aged past what his years should have allowed:_

_“I’m dying, Feebie.”_

_It had taken him years to accept it, months, days, minutes, seconds and yet as those dutifully dedicated brown eyes regarded him over the baggie of AZT that would not be infused that night…_ _Freddie felt a tear slide down his cheek. He had never felt inclined to cry about his illness, grieve yes, but cry? Never. Not until he saw the same grief he so often felt for the man he used to be, mirrored in Phoebe’s eyes. His loyal best-friend, his agony aunt, his personal assistant. His soul brother._

 _Who had been strong and stalwart for years, months, days, minutes, seconds and yet, finally broke down when Freddie refused to allow him to administer the hail-Mary stop-gap medication._ _It had only worked for a short while. It was the best out there and yet it wasn’t enough to change anything. It wasn’t going to save him._

_He’d accepted that eventually. Sometimes even the best of times had to end._

_“You won’t die, Freddie. They’ll invent something, a new miracle drug and it will fix all of this. You’ll see. You have so much to live for! Mary’s going to have another baby soon! Queen will tour again! And didn’t you want to make a theater production with Montserrat? You could both write something again or maybe perform Phantom together! Wouldn’t that be wonderful?_ _And what about that Ireland bungalow you and Jim are building? Don’t you want to **see** it?”_

_Phoebe wasn’t looking at him anymore, he was staring straight ahead and if it weren’t for the slight trembling of his shoulders or the shine of tears sliding down his cheeks, Freddie would never have known he was crying._

_“Feebie.”_

_The arms that held onto him were wavering and just as unstable as Dorothy’s house had been in the tornado that tore it up from its moorings. Bringing her somewhere else entirely._

_“Oh please Freddie, don’t_ _go!”_

_It had been Phoebe’s only request for as long as he’d known him._

_Phoebe had never wanted for anything, never asked for anything._

_So of course, he craved the one thing that Freddie could never give him._

_Freddie Mercury died in the stillest hours of the evening, on November 24th, 1991, at the age of forty-five._

And not for the first time, Beau LaCroix woke up screaming in the wee hours of the morning, on _November 24th, 2013_ , at the tender age of sixteen.

He hurtled towards the tiny dormitory bathroom, the pink bedsheets sweaty and tangled up around his knees, nearly bringing him down faster than nature, as he violently threw up into his sink, over and over again as yellow bile dripped from his nose.

The burn torched his insides, akin to swallowing molten lava or a packful of smoldering cigarettes, fire consuming its kindling until there was nothing left.

He heaved up his meager dinner from the night before, over and over again, sour and hot all at once.

When he’d finally gotten past the worst of it and managed to lift his glassy eyes to gaze upon his pale visage in the mirror before him, it felt worse than having done nothing at all.

The chunks of spittle and peachy vomit were _not_ the most horrid things to look back at him.

The worst was the _foreign creature_ in the mirror, the veritable _child_ with the mottled spots of a dalmatian and a face far similar to a younger Roger’s than to his own. The child with _his voice._ Whose round pink lips moved in time with his, those _too-big_ and _wrong-hued_ eyes that traced his every move. The child that wasn’t _him._ The face that wasn’t _his_. Those hands that had never danced across ivory keys, more dotted than the night sky. Those hands that gripped the edges of the sink like a life preserver.

The porcelain hand that curled into a fist, slamming into the glass over and over again, until the only remnants of the strange boy’s reflection were in pieces, spread across the ground in a broken halo, along with what felt like a quarter of his own blood.

He watched that blood slowly drip down those delicate fingers, the devil’s ink-well.

_Beelzebub._

Those fingers picked up a single glass shard, big enough for him to see part of his reflection in. For a moment, he saw himself as he _was._ Dark hair, sharp cheekbones, dancing eyes, but then _the boy_ was back and there were tears falling down his _wrong_ cheeks.

Tears that stung his lips and made him bow his head.

For _Beau LaCroix_ was _Freddie Mercury_ no more.

But in those nightmarish seconds between both lives, he was _nothing_ at all. 

He was truly _dead._

 

-X-

  
_“When I was 16, my senses fooled me_  
_Thought gasoline was on my clothes_  
_I knew that something would always rule me_  
_I knew the scent was mine alone…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
Beau had his bulky bubblegum-pink headphones pulled low over his pearl-adorned ears, eyes closed as he ran through a few barre exercises on pointe.

Using the jutting side of a trailer _(Joe’s most likely)_ as his makeshift barre. He'd kicked off his clunky trainers and half-heartedly tugged on the pair of dying pointe shoes that he always kept tied-up in his bag.

The only thing he really bothered with was tying the laces, as he didn’t need an injury so late into the season. Mouthing along with each movement as his body obeyed like the dutiful clay doll he had trained it to be. _Parallel. Plié. Roll-up. Roll-down. Roll-up. Roll-down. First position. Demi-pointe. Push-over. Tondues. Second position. Relieve. 1/4 turn. Plié on pointe. Fifth position. Relieve. Pase. Repeat. Parallel._

Then he nearly _grand jeté_ ’d away when an unfamiliar arm wrapped around his waist, fingers splayed across his abdomen.

He most certainly did not _yelp,_ he instead whipped around with a suspicious pout and a scowl.

 _“Joseph_ , darling! What the bloody hell!?”

_(Yes, he had remembered Not-John’s name in his panic, quite the achievement)._

The redhead laughed out loud, then made a low choking noise in the pit of his throat, as the back of his hand brushed against Beau’s stupidly erect nipples. The tiny blonde rolled his eyes, “ _What_ , dear? Never felt a _nipple piercing_ before?” Sticking out his tongue like the cheeky bugger he was. The eternal little shit.

“You were…?” As if the headphones yoked around his neck and mock-artful pose weren't a dead giveaway.

“ _Dancing_ or well, _warming up._ ”

“In ballet slippers?” His voice sounded almost _disbelieving_ for some odd reason, what _else_ would Beau be in?

The younger boy nodded towards the sparkly red trainers left abandoned by the cinderblocks holding up his trailer. “Would you have preferred _those_ , love? Do they compliment the outfit better?”

Beau tugged off the headphones and stowed them away, along with the tennies. No need for them now, the pointe shoes would be best for what he had to do. He bounced up and down on them a few more times, rolling through the cracks _(of both his joints and the shoes)_ as Joe sputtered.

“Are you dancing in the movie?”

_Yes. But Rami’s playing me, dearie._

“Not quite, but Rami is. I’m showing him a few moves.” Brian had asked, _(read: insisted upon it)._

Joe’s russet eyebrows rushed up to meet his hairline. “Oh wow, the _Freddie_ moves? I thought you were just a voice actor. I mean... Not, that there’s anything _bad_ about being _just_ a voice-actor… wait... um… _help?”_ Ears and cheeks flushed as red as Beau’s trainers.

The blonde laughed, a genuine hill-rolling greenery _Freddie_ laugh. Too loud, too boisterous, the sort that could have ripped the largest ships from their moorings or livened up a cemetery. He linked his arm with Joe’s and tugged the older bloke over to where an enormous green screen and the other boys most likely waited.

“No problem, darling. I think we’re needed on set anyway.”

A flirty wink as Joe added _stripper?_ to his mental list of possibilities.

Alas, being on set wasn’t much better. It felt like Beau’s eyes were going to roll clean out of his head and spin away like tops into the darkness.

“Rami, dear, are you _jousting?_ Why does it look like you’re about to ram someone clean through with that microphone stand? _Here.”_

The tiny blonde laced his speckled hands over those large olive ones, and guided the far taller man through some easy dance movements. Well, _Freddie-esque firecracker_ dance movements. _(What was choreography?)_ Trying to coax the stand into more of an extension of the actor’s body than a separate entity. His shoulders were too tense and Beau told him so, poking him lightly with his chin to correct it, as he rhythmically nudged the inside of the older man’s knee to make him bop his body and list to the side. Adding a little bit of _attitude_ to that stiff body of his.

“Loosen up, angel. We aren’t going to war over here.”

 _Loosen_ was an understatement, it didn’t feel like the actor was _breathing_ at all.

Rather than calling EMS, the smaller blonde lashed out like a cobra and flicked him hard near the belly button. The ensuing squeal was enough to break through that forced tension. _Surface tension_ , like when falling on a body of water turned the hydrogen and oxygen bonds to veritable concrete. The aftershocks were a few choked-off gasps, the sort that worried Beau something fierce.

“Love, are you _alright?”_

He asked, when they finally had five minutes peace to themselves. Tugging his new friend and charge off into the wings of the newly erected _Live Aid_ set, away from prying eyes. Poor Rami did his best to nod, still a shade or two paler than usual, which belayed the effect. When he realized no one else was looking however, that smile cracked straight down the middle. _“I don’t think I can do this, Beau.”_  Eyes downcast, as if ashamed of the admission.

“ _What?_ Why ever _not?”_

Another rocky sigh before,“Who am I _kidding?”_ It came out in a pant, eyes still turned downward, his hair slick with beads of sweat. “I’m not _Freddie_. I can’t play him. _Nobody can._  ...Well, maybe _you_ could.”

Beau froze for an instant, even his erratic rebellious heart stilled in his chest. Were the similarities _too much?_ Could Rami _see_ too much? But the actor was already moving to slouch against a makeshift wall of empty instrument and amp cases.

Eyes closed and his fingers idly toying with the peppermint bracelet still adorning his wrist. “I think they picked the wrong actor.” The young man wasn’t even in costume yet, they were only a few hours into the first day on set. _He couldn’t have been feeling defeated already!_

“I don’t think I can do justice to _his memory._ ”

Those heavy words and that wretched look on a face so oddly similar to what his own had once been, were far too much for Beau to handle.

He seized the surprised young man by the shoulders and leveled with him, doing the very best he could.

“Rami, you _aren’t_ Freddie. You don’t _have_ to be him. Just _play_ him, _play the game.”_ He huffed a forlorn little laugh at his own joke. “You’re the _lucky_ one, you’re not a self-absorbed asshole who took everything away from the people he loved. Who _used_ people and didn’t know how to be alone and tried to pretend he was this great godlike rockstar, when really he was this stupid kid who never really _belonged anywhere_. And when he finally found a home? Hm? He _destroyed_ it. So be happy that Freddie’s just a _part_ for you and nothing more.” He let out a long shuddering breath like a hurricane through his lips and blinked away ghostly tears that would not fall. _You can walk away from this someday. This is the cross I’ll have to bear for all my life._

“There is no grand memory to live up to, dear, no angry ghost to haunt you, it’s all just a part to play.”

_He’s dead, darling._

  
_-_ X-

  
_“When I was a man I thought it ended_  
_When I knew love's perfect ache_  
_But my peace has always depended_  
_On all the ashes in my wake.”_

  
_-_ X-

  
The piano was left sitting alone on set.

Everyone had scattered, running to grab lunch at the tents or to their trailers for a bit of rest.

Leaving Beau alone with the bloody piano in the open air.

There was just _something_ about being onstage again, about standing where he had once stood. Only this time, he was dressed in a pair of pink tracksuit bottoms, an oversized canary yellow hoodie, and his ratty pointe shoes.

A boy standing where a man once stood.

Then, he _wasn't._

He was sitting at the piano, long before he realized _what_ he was doing, or _why_ he was even doing it. His fingers toying with the keys in a burst of such unbridled joy, and yet he could still feel his throat tightening up. His hands turned as heavy as anvils, his chest wrapped up in a crushing straitjacket. A melody playing before he could still his hands and words that came like a plea from the heavens. _“In my defence, what is there to say?”_

No one answered him.

He still remembered being a little boy, his doting aunt instructing him on how to hold his body as he played. How she’d always griped about his playing being a little off-kilter. He still pounded the ivory keys like a knight battling a dragon for the hand of a virtuous lover. A natural force to be reckoned with. A tornado leaving little, but destruction in its wake. _Desolation. Something, someone_ to be frightened off.

_“I'm just a singer with a song. How can I try to right the wrong?”_

Hm, a bit like the epitaph beneath his statue in Montreux.

_Freddie Mercury_

_Lover Of Life - Singer Of Songs_

_1946 - 1991_

The pack of Marlboros was burning a hole in his pocket, and yet he didn’t smoke them, for every time his fingers erred close he would see Brian’s face in his mind, those wrecked eyes as empty as they’d been at his funeral decades before. _‘Eager to leave us again, are you?’_

“ _For just a singer with a melody… I’m caught in between, with a fading dream.”_

 _Lover Of Life_ , he wanted to laugh so hard it ached. _Lover Of Life. Loser Of Life. Loved Till He Died._ Might as well have etched: _Fucked Around Till It Killed Him._

_(That wasn't what was meant by those words and he knew it. He was just a bitter old man in a boy's body, a Benjamin Button)._

With his eyes closed, he could pretend they were at a show instead of a movie set. _(As if this whole second life wasn’t a show all its own)._

With the wind reaching up like the doting hands of a father, to comb its plaintive fingers through his hair.

Freddie’s old hands settled on the keys, a song buoying his heart, it was almost like he could reach across the decades. Hold himself down in 1974 with cement around his feet and desperation in his grip. Suddenly it didn’t matter if his body was wrong. That his hair was the wrong color, that he was still too small, too young, that the need to shave never weighed heavily on his mind, _(because if hair grew in at all, it was fine and peachy soft and only visible in the right sort of lighting),_ because for an instant, the world was _right_ and he could _sing_ without antifreeze being poured down his throat.

_“We destroy the love - it's our way. We never listen enough, never face the truth. Then like a passing song…”_

_Was he Orpheus? Was this his penance for all he had done? Or was he Eurydice?_

Was he being _led_ from hell or was he the _leader?_

_Did it matter, when they both ended up dead in the end?_

_“Love is here and then it's gone.”_

With _gone_ leaving his lips, so was he.

He was a little boy on a spice island, tracing shapes in the clouds with his fingertips. A little boy who learned old French Creole lullabies from his grandmother and would sing them to the stars, in case they ever got lonely. A youth who would bring out a sketchbook and draw the faces of his old life into the constellations. Every dash and line was executed with love. Love lines, like the shiny tear-tracks on his Deaky’s face so long ago, on that afternoon when they’d learned the truth about the illness that would take his life.

 _His Miami_ who had put up with his every failing like the dutiful friend and manager he was, flickered across his treacherous mind. His _Miami Beach_. Who had held him in his surprisingly strong arms, even after the terrible words were spoken, the harbinger of his death that hung between them for the rest of his days. Miami who had composed his last love letter to the world, who had held his hand long after others had left him. _Oh Miami. Did I ever tell you how much I loved you? How much I appreciated you? My homing beacon to the mothership._

_“Oh what on earth, Oh what on earth! How do I try? Do we live or die?”_

The words spilled out of him like a facet under far too much water pressure.

 _Singing_ was part of him, no matter how much he was loathe to admit it. He was a _Singer Of Songs_. He belonged to the people, he belonged to the stage. Which was why he’d fumbled his way back onto it as a danseur. Why he was currently playing piano on a set that shouldn’t have been disturbed and belting out Dave’s words like they were his own. There was no _Red Special_ to croon to. No back beat. No cacophony of drums to guide him.

Just his surprisingly powerful voice.

That voice that had never faded or been affected by the wash of vomit, packs of tarry ciggies, or his unwilling body.

The only thing that had ever shaken his voice had been the lesions on his vocal cords and even then, it had been a new kind of beautiful. One that felt like gargling razorblades and left him coughing up clots.

_Beautiful._

No one interrupted his impromptu concert, his first in what seemed like millennia, his voice simply petered off with a heartfelt plea: _“Oh help me God. Please help me.”_

There was no answer once again, just his well-deserved shackles of loneliness.

He blinked open his baby blues, surprised at the wetness of his cheeks and the shaky breaths rattling away in his lungs.

The clapping was new, however. He jerked his head to the side in surprise, only to see a tiny crowd had gathered, watching him.

Joe, Ben and Gwilym were watching in three different stages of gaping. Just sluggishly blinking at him and then clapping frantically once they had his attention, Joe even whistled with two fingers stuck in his mouth. _(Freddie’s long-lost son? got added to the list in his head, as well as the tangled conspiracy wall in his trailer)._ Roger was the loudest though, clapping at Beau as if he was looking clean through him. Seeing his best-friend sitting at the piano in a white tank-top and jeans, instead of the teenage boy he was now, in mismatched sweats and pointe shoes.

Brian was grinning ear-to-ear, something liquid glimmering at the edges of his eyes, his hand resting on the shoulder of another man, a larger man with light hair and melted ichorous eyes. Beau didn’t recognize him at first, the years had been hard on him and of all the people Beau had expected to see slowly clapping and crying at his impromptu performance, that man certainly wasn't it.

“That was _brilliant!_ Are you his _voice-actor?”_

 _That voice._ All Beau could do was blink. It sounded like coming home.

“Oh, how terribly rude of me,” His once PA gingerly walked up the risers and extended a hand. “I’m _Peter Freestone_. I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure.” An easy warm laugh stumbled out of his mouth.

He clasped Beau’s hand with all the cordiality in the world. But it wasn’t enough. Not for him, not for them. The man who had been his closest confidante for twelve long years. His agony aunt. One of his best-friends, his personal assistant, who had spent the last few decades making sure that Freddie's memory stayed alive.

Beau wanted to scoff, his _memory._

_What a lark._

_“Wait,”_ The old man squinted as if he’d seen something in Beau’s spotted face. A flicker of _something,_ that would once have been shining as bright as a lantern between them. _One if by land. Two if by sea. Three if you’re to take all that’s left of me._ “Have we met?”

_It’s me, Feebie. It’s me._

_I’m so sorry. I am so, so bloody sorry for everything that’s happened between us and everything that happened after I was gone. I’m so sorry. I should have looked after everything, I should have planned it out better, it’s just_ …

_God, Phoebe could you ever forgive me?_

_“The Royal Ballet!”_ His once best-friend crowed. “That’s what it is! You’re one of the Royal Ballet’s dancers!”

He smiled, though his heart was breaking like glass, like that mirror all those years ago.

“I am.”

_I never deserved you, did I?_

He stood up on those trembling legs of his, weak as a newborn foal, and couldn’t help the tears that threatened to make his mascara run.

“You know, I don’t think I ever properly _thanked you.”_ His Phoebe’s eyes creased, confusion apparent in those endless depths. Beau was shocked that Rog or Bri hadn’t warned the poor man, hadn’t even _mentioned it_ , going by the surprise. “For being my friend.” Beau tacked on by way of explanation. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t give you what you asked for, my darling _Feebie_. But I couldn’t stay.”

The small ballet dancer couldn't even stay then, he marched his way down the steps of the stage, sniffling and forcing back the tears that would have destroyed him. So he didn’t see the way Mr. Peter Freestone stiffened at being called _Phoebe_  again, or the way he froze, mouth half-open. Knowing _that voice, those intonations, those pet-names._

Remembering a somber bedroom a hundred years ago and his best-friend telling him no more.

His hand flew to cover his mouth, while at the same time tears sprang to his eyes.

And he turned like a blind man seeking the sun.

  
-X-

  
_“When I was a child, I'd sit for hours_  
_Staring into open flame_  
_Something in it had a power_  
_Could barely tear my eyes away.”_

  
-X-

  
Beau read the story of Barbro Karlén and Anne Frank when he was eight years old, on those long nights in 2005 when Katrina and Rita battered windows and broke levees.

He began to dread his forty-fifth birthday.

Barbro Karlén had begun to forget her supposed memories of being Anne Frank, once she reached the painfully young age when Anne had died in the camps. It had happened to many supposed reincarnates.

So what if it happened to _him?_

What if one morning he awoke, and Freddie Mercury was just a name, a face.

What would he do, in the moment where he became nothing at all?

  
-X-

  
_“All you have is your fire_  
_And the place you need to reach_  
_Don't you ever tame your demons…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
When he brought his former bandmates inside his flat for the first time, things were… _not great._

Mostly because Char walked out of the hall bathroom, moments later, with a frothy toothbrush poking out the side of his mouth and a pair of grimy boxer shorts hugging the curves of his ass, as well as a striped psychedelic sock on one foot.

Those boxers had made the rounds between the LaCroix brothers an alarming amount of times in his life. He wasn't even sure who's they had started out as. 

“Hey bitch, you’re out of dish-soap.” _(Why his brother knew that after emerging from the bathroom, Beau would never know)._

Then the older LaCroix boy seemed to process the three grumpy old men trailing behind Beau, the ones who had slept on his doorstep the night before, and in the next second, _who_ they actually were. Beau got to watch as his oldest brother’s face metamorphosed from _‘who-the-fuck_ ’ to _‘you-the-fuck’._

Mere moments after that revelation, his brother’s huge callused hand shot out at lightning speed and dragged the small blonde over in no time flat, the grown man positioning himself between Beau and his soul-mates like the human Wall of China.

“You can leave now. _Buh bye.”_ Charlie flashed that enormous shark grin of his. As Beau contemplated just how hard he would have to ram that toothbrush down his brother’s throat to actually kill v. maim him.

As it stood, Baptiste came to save the day, as usual _(Charlie’s last cogent brain cell and Beau's stand-in Cricket)._

Roger looked like even a three feet divide was too far for him and Beau to be apart. Deaky looked about as murderous as Charlie or close to it, _(which was pretty horrifying to say the least)._ While Brian seemed to be resting on the cusp of getting parental and _oh no_ , they could _not_ have that. Beau had two dads already, he did not need _Maggie May_ as another one.

“Char, _no.”_

The dark-haired Bruce Lee lookalike was about to gladly pound some old timers into the linoleum.

But then pulled the most affronted pout when Baptiste crossed his reedy arms and scowled.

“ _Tits!”_  Whining as if he was a tabby whose tail had just been trod on.

“Go to the _bathroom_ , Charlie.” Beau had to disguise his snicker, _was JB just naming the first place with_ _a lock?_ “Or I won’t do _that thing_ with you that I promised.” His voice stressing _thing_ in a way that made Char flush with violent cherry-red anger, like one of those lollipops with a tootsie roll inside.

 _“But!”_ The older squawked, only to get vigorously shoved towards the bathroom that he’d come from. Splittle and frothy toothpaste dripping down his chin in a way that made Beau mourn his carpet and what used to be.

“No _buts_. Let Bowie-boy make his own mistakes.” Baptiste sighed, making Beau bristle. _Mistakes?_ What did he mean by _mistakes?_ _You shouldn’t have done this_ , his rational mind reminded viciously. _They know that you’ve fucked everyone over by simply being the selfish prick you are._ Instantly, Beau felt sick enough to follow Charlie into the bathroom and worship the porcelain throne.

But of course, he wouldn’t let anyone _know_ that, instead he forced a smile to his face and a false bubbly bravado into his voice. “A _thing? Ew, that’s disgusting!”_ Bringing a fist to his mouth and poking his tongue at the inside of his cheek, enough to make a protrusion visible. The look on Baptiste’s face made the grossness worth it. The older boy had paled instantly, looking mighty green himself.

“First of all,” Baptiste held up a single finger. “ _Great,_ now I have to pencil in some time to puke.” He shook his head in that long-suffering, _I’m surrounded by idiots_ way of his. “Second, I’m going to Sudan on a mission trip with his church, bossy boots.”

Beau stuck out his tongue, hoping it would be enough to send the other boy going _anywhere else. What? Sometimes he forgot that Charlie was a youth pastor. Sue him._

Instead of flouncing off, however, his big brother shepherded them all towards the master bedroom and they crawled into Beau’s bed together, like they were back in the early 70s and nothing in the world could touch them.

Fingers laced together and faces adorned with tired and lined smiles, Beau was back in the middle and surrounded by a cocoon of warmth, as though the years had been but a dream and he’d never really left at all. He could pretend to still be _Freddie Bulsara_ , and that his boys were still boys. And nothing in the world would ever separate them.

Beau nodded off, long before the others. His head pillowed on John’s chest and the older man working his long bassist fingers through those delicate curls.

The tiny boy didn’t even flinch as Deaky’s warm tears dripped onto his forehead and slid down his cheeks as a replacement for his own.

“Deaks, are you _okay?”_ Roger’s familiar gruff voice, choked up with exhaustion and feelings, cut through the darkness like a knife and somehow the sadness only pressed in harder, tighter. The bassist had to bite back a whimper, a sob.

“John?” Even Bri sounded concerned.

“He’s _back._ ” Still an impossibility in his rational, scientific, engineering mind and yet there was no denying the identity of the soul in his arms. Freddie who had returned to them despite everything to the contrary. Because no matter what happened between them.

Freddie always came back.

John should've known it would be something like this.

“We _know_ , Deaky.” Humoring him like he was the senile one, like they weren’t all old men, huddled around their shining star like moths to a flame. _(Beau would fight that moniker bitterly when he awoke. Likening it to being on a quest for Apollo’s Terpsichore, and yet only finding Polyhymnia)._

“He’s _back_ and he doesn’t blame me for…”

His voice was choked off, wizened, rough, _old._ Thick with the grief of a lifetime. But he hadn’t registered the words until Brian’s long probing fingers danced across his jawline, enough to catch a tear and hold it up to shine like a diamond, in the fractals of sunshine peaking through the slats of Beau’s shaded bedroom window.

“For _what?”_ As though they didn’t know. As though they didn’t still _blame him_ for it.

The confession of his ultimate sin. “For not being there.” He yearned to fall to his knees and gather up the shattered pieces of his life, presenting them to Beau as penance.

_For not being there when he died, when he needed me the most. Oh Freddie, I’m so sorry…_

John Deacon cradled that precious blonde youth to his chest as if he could somehow makeup for all the times when he hadn’t. The boy made a sleepy chuffed noise and buried his face deeper into John’s soft pecs. As if he hadn’t a care in the world. While the poor bassist was tortured with thoughts of making the same mistakes twice. Those honeysuckle curls and rosebud lips attempting to distract him from from his self-flagellation with every breath. 

_Beautiful._

And inside his tiny towhead, Beau danced a whole ballet as _Ondine,_  reveling in the constant pounding heartbeat of the mortal man _Palemon_.

For as a water nymph, she was born without a heart.

  
-X-

  
_“But always keep 'em on a leash.”_

  
-X-

 


	9. Where have all the gay guys gone?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys!!!! I'm so sorry this is both really late and really shitty!! (I'll probably edit later but eh. Enjoy :D).
> 
> Features: Little Lion Man by Mumford and Sons, Good Guys by Mika (Thank you @UniversesVisiting) AND! Linked below are two dances that make an appearance! 1st is ballet, 2nd is contemporary. 
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRmCXwVEd34
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_heSIlgi72w

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our boy Beau has a breakdown and his brothers have problems of their own. That our boy doesn't notice. Sigh.

_“It's not the cowboys that are missing anymore_  
_That problem was already old in ninety-four_  
_Don't be offended, this might seem a little wrong_

_Where have all the gay guys gone?”_

 

  
Considering all the running he’d done in the past few months, he was understandably good at ducking away from the concerned hands and prying eyes that followed him, even in his ratty pointe shoes.

Beau ripped them off as soon as he could, tugging his trainers back on with the practiced hand of one who was so often switching between them.

He was crying despite his best efforts to the contrary, the fallen tears dripping behind him on the bumpy tarmac like breadcrumbs to lead him home, to a home that wasn’t even there anymore.

His life had become a broken Aesop, a fairytale with no resolution.

He did his best to get out of there as soon as he could. Just to fucking _breathe_ for a goddamn minute. His chest was so tight that it felt like it was restricting his fluttering bruised and battered lungs, turning them black and blue rather than soft pink, and left his hands trembling outside of his control.

A strong foreign hand wrapped around his forearm, halting him in his warpath.

Ben’s soft museum-worthy eyes blinked down at him. “Beau, that was _bloody brilliant!_ I didn’t realize you could sing like him as well as… _Oi, are you alright?”_

The younger boy’s breaths were catching in his chest and he could feel a panic attack bubbling just under the surface. Ben, despite his best intentions, wasn’t exactly helpful as Beau watched his countenance swirl and warp like abstract art. The lines that made up the _Not-Roger’s_ face grew more and more smudged with every moment that passed, so that soon, no matter how many times Beau blinked, he couldn’t differentiate where one line stopped and another began.

“Beau? Beau, are you _okay?”_

As if repeating his name over and over, was going to change anything. A weak attempt to quiet a soul that had been shoved and locked into a place that it had never quite fit.

_“Beau?”_

Cornflower eyes met pacific blue, and something inside him snapped like a rubber-band.

_“Don’t call me that!”_

An lashing asp for a tongue, searching for Cleopatra’s tit.

“ _Beau?_ But that’s your _name?”_

It wasn’t always.

His knees sort of gave up on him then, and he sunk down to rest on his shins, inadvertently pulling Ben down with him. One free hand digging viciously into the unrelenting ground, ripping up his skin as he panted, open-mouthed and erratic. It felt like he was _drowning_ all over again, his lungs failing him once more. He was far too familiar with the feeling of suffocation. Of his own body’s betrayal and the cold emptiness that awaited. The silence and finality of the body bag that zipped away any lingering hopes and dreams, holding the remains of a life cut short far too early. He was wheezing but it sounded so far away, as though it was happening in the next room over. A memory of old pain, phantom pain like losing a limb a lifetime ago.

“Shit! Are you even _breathing?”_

Ben sounded like he was talking an ocean away, but Beau smiled hard enough to draw blood, steadying himself on the first solid surface his fingers made contact with. Ben’s bicep, and using it to anchor himself, to draw in a few more breaths, waiting for the world to come into focus once more, for his feelings to be dragged back into the chasm from whence they came. Like a monster to lock away under the bed.

“B? Are you with me _again?”_

He nodded, trying to belay any remaining worries with a weak smile. “Yes, dear. I’m fine.” It sounded brittle, even to his own traitorous ears.

The panic ebbing back again like the coming tide, allowing nothingness and grief to return to the forefront of his mind once again. _Welcome back, old friends. I almost missed you._

Ben seemed unconvinced, “Are you sure? What just happened?” The older blonde looked like he was moments away from rushing, ass over tit, to grab any nearby paramedics.

“Oh I got a little _Victorian_ on you, I’m afraid. Nearly _swooned_ , darling.” He laughed, aiming to wave off the worry that had settled like a fog between them.

The other blonde did, loathly, let Beau go on his merry way eventually, but only when he insisted.

And not before pressing a bottle of water into those speckled still-shaking hands with a pensive look, one that stuck with him for weeks to come.

Beau twisted open the top and gave an experimental sniff. “Is this vodka, love?”

Ben’s only response was to pull the same look that Brian so often did, when the old man got particularly motherly and exasperated with having to take care of three fully grown hairy kids.

Beau rolled his eyes, “Spoilsport.”

The boy really was woefully miscast.

  
-X-

  
_“And to the romance when I was fourteen years old_  
_And to my heroes that were dressed up in gold_  
_Only hoping one day I could be so bold_

_Where have all the gay guys gone?”_

  
-X-

  
That half-filled plastic bottle ended up thrown at the feet of one Roger Taylor and one Brian May, splashing them considerably and doing very little to douse the fire that burned inside of Beau.

“You _assholes!”_ He roared, fists clenched and eyes pale like kindling ready to be set alight.

Both of them were left staring at him, wide-eyed in their mock-directors’ chairs. It took a pretty minute before Brian had recovered enough to clear his throat and add a: _“Well that’s not very nice, Fred.”_ Which certainly didn’t help the situation.

“Don’t you _dare_ patronize me!” Traitorous tears burned in the corners of his eyes and he wished with all his might that he was staring at two opinionated beanpoles. One with blonde hair in an angel’s halo and a ruddy slash of a mouth, the other with a mass of dark curls that bobbed out in every direction, a particularly errant piece even getting stuck on those wet pouty lips, he had a tiny tic of licking at them when he got nervous. Beau wished the hand that grabbed at his curly-top’s lapels had been an unblemished olive and those fingernails black with chipped varnish. That the same was true of the fist he raised, bottom lip trembling.

“You had no right to spring me on _Phoebe_ like that! Roger was one thing, but Phoebe didn’t have to know! He didn’t and now you’ve gone and fucked up his life! For what?” He shook the fistful of fabric. “To _test_ me? Am I not _Freddie_ enough for you, dear? You had to go and involve yet another person whose life I’ve irreparably _fucked up!?”_

But he wasn’t _Freddie Mercury_ anymore.

And he was holding an old man with silver curls by the front of his shirt, mere inches away from pounding the shit out of him.

He forced himself to let go, to step back. Using a frightening amount of restraint that he certainly hadn’t had when he was nineteen the first time around. _(He was still so afraid)._

“Well, _Freddie_ , not everything’s about _you! Peter_ is here to consult on the movie, not to deal with all of _this.”_

Roger had a hand on Brian’s back, glaring at Beau with all he had in him, and he punctuated this by gesturing to Beau, at _all of him. Wow. Why wasn’t he surprised?_ It felt like they were boys again, party lines drawn. Rog would always go with Bri, then Freddie would side with John. Only there was no feathery-haired brunet beside him, no one to temper his fury.

“ _This?_ Am I a _problem_ for you, Rog?”

His once-lover rolled his blue eyes with a rough bark of a laugh, as if Beau had suggested pigs flying, Brian straightening his hair again and all manner of impossible things. “You have been a _problem of mine_ for close to _fifty years_ , _Fred_ no point in changing it up now.”

Beau flushed so violently that he was surprised when he didn’t make himself dizzy, all the blood rushing to his face like that. “ _Oh!_ Well maybe I should just take my leave then, dear! If I’m such a bloody _inconvenience!”_ He stomped off, practically fuming at the ears. Or he would’ve, if it hadn’t been for Roger.

His _Roggie_ who had always been able to push his buttons in a way few people ever could.

“And there he goes! Running off again!” The drummer shaking his head and gritting his teeth. “You were never like this before, you know, such a bloody _cowa—_ “ The once-blonde’s voice cut off halfway through the word, as if he’d scared himself with it, caught himself before he got carried away. Something that never would have happened in their youth. So once again, Beau was faced with the knowledge that his younger best-friend was an old man now.

And then suddenly, history was repeating itself.

Beau had once watched death snuff out his old lovers until it finally came for him. He had stared death in the face. And when his eyes met his dear Roger’s… he realized, that he was _doomed in every life._

The ghost paused, turning back with a wild look in his eyes.

“What was that, Roggie? A _coward?”_ The word sounded dangerous when it slipped past his lips. But the anger had bled out of him, along with the facade of happiness.

His hands were trembling.

Brian moved towards him, as if to try and wrap his arms around Beau’s narrow waist, to comfort him in a way that was several decades too late. But the tiny blonde side-stepped him and bumped right into a soft jumper. _John!_

He whipped around, heart instantly buoyed, searching for the one person who could temper his fury.

Instead he was confronted with an unfamiliar old man and very large searching eyes. Beau’s chest clenched tightly once more and he resisted the urge to put his fist through the  innocent loitering man’s face.

“You’re not Deaky.”

The old man’s eyebrow quirked slightly, upsetting the balance of his whole face, a face that he should have known on first sight, but didn’t. It tugged at something in his chest, but he had no room for feelings anymore. He was so sick and tired of feeling everything, like his very fucking skin was dialed up to eleven.

“No, I’m _not_. I take it you were expecting someone else?”

Beau scrunched up his nose and waved a flippant hand. “Well _duh_ , dearie? And I don’t know you, so kindly _bugger off.”_

Instead of taking offense, the man only smiled, almost fond, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe the smart-mouthed little brat standing in front of him. “Does the sun not set behind me anymore, Fred?”

The blonde froze.

It felt like someone striding over his bloody grave, as a cold chill swept down his spine. _Oh bloody sodding…_

He stepped forwards till they were maybe a ruler’s width apart, peering into the face of the man who had written his last will and testament. The man who had told his final truth to the world and had taken care of his boys when Freddie was no longer able to. His heart was beating in his knees and he just drooped over, his forehead pressed against Miami’s soft jumpered tum and started to cry _silently and pitifully_ , one hand reaching up to grab a fistful of jumper just to steady himself.

“ _Miami, darling_ …” He sighed. “ _Fuck._ ”

All of a sudden, he was standing in his old bedroom at Garden Lodge, he and Jim’s bedroom. God how long had it been since he had been able to _stand_ unaided in that room? The decorations were the same as when he’d left them… _of course they were. It was only a memory. His_ memory. Or something close to it, as he watched the emaciated skeletal man on the bed, who was meant to be _him_ , move about in his near-death throes. The lucid period before the storm, before Phoebe would have to race after a doctor’s car and watch his best-friend's ashy remains be zipped up into a body bag, the loving man, the man he’d once held onto as a brother. Phoebe, who had pressed a small teddy-bear into those flaccid arms, just in case he got lonely in the dark all by himself. He had never really been a fan of small dark spaces, you see. And there was no one to hold his hand this time around.

Miami had laid beside him on the sickbed, holding corpse Freddie like he was afraid of moving around too much, lest the action cause the once-great frontman any pain.

Beau was sobbing where he stood, the breaths hitching in his chest like they hitched in that of the dying man.

They were breathing as _one._

" _Following enormous conjecture in the press, I wish to confirm that I have been tested HIV positive and have Aids. I felt it correct to keep this information private in order to protect the privacy of those around me._

_However, the time has now come for my friends and fans around the world to know the truth, and I hope everyone will join with me, my doctors and all those worldwide in the fight against this terrible disease."_

Every word that Miami had carefully crafted was another nail in his coffin. _One after the other._

All Beau could do was _scream and scream_ , howling like the wind that could easily tear shutters from homes and whisk sand up into storms.

Freddie lapsed into a coma.

He would be dead soon enough.

Beau mouthed those words into Miami’s chest, the words that he couldn’t stop from coming, the words that they had crafted together. It was like a vomiting, a compulsion that he couldn’t control. It was all he could do to hold on. His breaths were coming in and out of him too fast, if they were coming at all.

He knew that they were too fast and too loud, it sounded as if he was drowning inside his chest again, _pneumonia, fluid filling his lungs, drowning_. His heart was in his throat, trapped and fighting to find a way out. He wanted to wail, but he had no air. His knees gave up, letting him fall onto the concrete for the second time that day. Or he would have, if a second pair of arms hadn’t looped around his chest to guide him down.

“Freddie, it’s _okay_. It’s just another panic attack, breathe with me. _Match your breaths to mine.”_

He used to get them all the time near the end.

Phoebe, oh God _Phoebe._

But his breaths didn’t slow, they picked up. His subconscious remembered dying, his soul remembered dying, and put two and two together. Phoebe and the feeling of suffocating once more? He was going again. He was dying again. Feeling life bleed away from his limbs and leave him bereft, leave him lost and incorporeal, forced to watch the world fall apart in his wake, until the sweet Russian girl all alone and sickly, still dripping with afterbirth, brought him to the steps of a lonely church.

_No! Roger! He couldn’t die without Roger, not when he’d promised to wait. Roger was coming, Brian too probably. But Roger, he was almost there. Almost in his arms. He could wait, he would wait, he had to wait._

_Roggie, Rog, hurry…_

“Freddie! Jesus, Fred _**breathe!** Come on!_” _Was that Roger? He sounded so far away. Freddie didn’t think he could wait any longer. But he had to. Rog was coming._

_Everything kept disappearing and coming back full force._

“He was like this earlier. He said he just swooned or something, it wasn’t this _bad_ … is he going to be _okay?”_ _Who was that? How dare they bother him in his deathbed, in his death throes, that was just impolite. Manners, tsk._

“What do you mean _‘Freddie’?”_

Brian’s voice joined in the fray with a frantic. “Freddie, Freddie _look at me please! Freddie **please!”**_ He sounded _so scared. Poor Maggie, all he ever did was scare him. His Maggie May. His lovely Mags, who would have followed him anywhere._

_His mouth tasted like metal, sucking on a new penny. Everything had gone so floaty, his chest didn’t even hurt anymore, but he had to wait for Roger. He’d written a new song for him. His Little Lion Man._

_I’m so sorry, Roggie. I’m so sorry, I think I’m going now…_

_Take care of them for me._

_You've always been better at it anyway._

_“But it was not your fault but mine_  
_And it was your heart on the line_  
_I really fucked it up this time_  
_Didn't I, my dear?_

…. _Didn’t I, my dear?”_

 _With what little breath he could still garner, he opened his mouth, how he still knew where his mouth was and how to use it was a miracle in and of itself. **“Roger!”** He screamed with all he had left in him, it was probably garbled beyond recognition, but he needed to try one last time. For one minute more, even if it was all he had with his soot-stained fingertips and the hellfires_ _that scorched and charred his lungs, consuming him from the inside out._

_Then he was in the arms of a familiar blonde, consumed by the smell of Marlboros, sweat and a hint of cheap cologne instead of fire and kindling, Roggie… his Roggie. He could go now. He was home now. Tears coated his face, at least he thought it was his face, everything was so hard now. Hard to think, hard to move, hard to drag in another breath._

“Freddie, open up your eyes! Please Fred, you’re scaring Brimi! God he’s so cold, why the fuck is he so cold! Jesus, where does he think he is!? Fred, Fred please just breathe for me! Breathe! I can’t lose you again, Jesus Christ! _Not again!” Roger was sobbing. He ached to comfort him, but his hands were like marble. He couldn’t move or lift them, it was as if they were detached from his body._

_So he went to sleep instead._

  
-X-

  
“ _If we are all in the gutter, it doesn't change who we are_  
_'Cause some of us in the gutter are looking up at the stars.”_

  
-X _-_

 

“Don’t do _it_ , Freddie.”

“It’s not his _fault!_ Beau can’t help the way _he is!”_

“Is this a _joke_?”

“You think it’s _funny_ , don’t you?”

“You have _four million dollars_ , perhaps you can _buy_ yourself a family.”

“Freddie Mercury or Beau LaCroix? _Choose already!_ You’re tearing our family apart!”

“How much did they pay you?”

“…He will have a _very_ hard life. _”_

  
-X-

  
“ _Thank you Rufus, thank you Auden and James Dean_  
_Thank you Emerson and Bowie for my dreams_

 _Wilfred Owen, Kinsey, Whitman and Rimbaud_  
_Thank you Warhol, thank you patience, thank you Porter and Cocteau…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
Dance training wasn’t all ballet.

Even though that was the path Beau had followed, he had still studied several different styles and often taught contemporary pieces in his spare time.

Including one that his darling Adam Lambert had stumbled upon him choreographing.

It was a piece to _Impossible by James Arthur_ , one of his students had picked the song, so in realizing that it was both slow and gentle, Beau decided to make his dance anything but. Why he’d chosen to dance in a set of tiny purple shorts and a flowing floral print tunic, he would never know, but his obstinate curls were down and bounced around stubbornly as he tossed his head this way and that.

The whole time he danced as if there was an invisible hand behind his belly-button, dragging him into the moves. As if it was all outside of his control. Messy and desperate. Whirling around and around like a human hurricane.

There was no fluidity, no pause, each move took over almost in violent timing. Flinging him around in his perceived anguish, grabbing at his chest, his hair, rolling about on his knees. Mouth parted in a little gasp to convey the deep pain inside. And the inner choreographer in his head reminded him that yes, he could still jump into his straddle splits without a problem and fall right into another.

His thighs would probably be bruised tomorrow, but eh.

He’d only gotten a minute or so through the song, when the clapping distracted him and he saw Adam sitting on the piano, coffee next to him, carton on his lap and eyes filled with something like adoration. An embarrassed flush bloomed warm and tacky on Beau’s speckled cheeks and he strode over with his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth. Taking the coffee as he tapped a 4/8 time on Adam’s knee.

“Shit, Freddie that was fucking _amazing.”_

Adam breathed out in a little sigh, hooking his ankle around the back of the blonde’s thigh and dragging him closer. The technically younger boy rolled his eyes and grabbed his iPhone.

“No, what’s fucking amazing is how many dances I’m going to choreograph to my new favorite playlist.” He pulled it up and passed it over with a bright shit-eating grin on his face. Watching a new blush bloom on Adam’s neck, once the technically older man had scrolled through the 200+ song playlist of nothing but Adam Lambert songs and covers. _Ha!_ Of course Beau could give back just as good as he got.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Of course I am, dear,” Reaching up with one hand to boop Adam on the nose and get an mock-grimace in return. “You give my songs all the love in the bloody world, let me give some to yours. I quite like them, darling.” He really did, Adam’s range was pretty fucking orgasmic.

“You’re quite the singer, _Madam Lambert.”_

“And you’re quite the dancer, _Mr. Bad Guy.”_

Their immediate laughter filled those empty dance studio halls in a way that made Beau feel unbelievably warm and comfy inside. Almost like drinking hot chocolate on a cold day.

It reminded him of dancing the _Adagio of Caesar and Cleopatra_ from _Cleopatra_ one of the first ballets that he was in as a company soloist. Being lifted into the sky, wearing a dark wig that almost made him look the way he did in the 70s, a common addition to his costumes, he wore a similar one when dancing in _La Esmeralda_ as Phoebus. Not quite perfect, but in the lowlight, it was enough to put his wandering soul at peace. He played both Cleopatra at times and then Antony in the actual ballet. The murderer and the murdered. But little excited him more than the adagio.

The moment after Cleopatra was revealed to Caesar and he was all but moonstruck by the innocent _murderess_ before him.

  
-X-

  
_“So tell me_  
_Where have all the good guys, where have all the good guys_

_Where have all the good guys gone?”_

  
-X-

  
As he did most times when he coughed himself into near unconsciousness, Charlemagne LaCroix wished for the sweet release of death to free him from this mortal coil.

The coughing had him breathless, as every time he would try to steady himself with a deep open-mouthed gulp of sweet O2, something would tug inside his chest and he’d be lost once more, coughing endlessly in a new fit.

He was also standing outside in the sticky heat instead of shoving his flushed face in a freezer to breathe in the chilled air, which didn’t help matters.

His only real aid was Henri, coming outside via a hotel sliding door and pressing a familiar plastic mouthpiece to his chapped lips with one hand, cradling the back of his dark-haired head with the other. About to attempt to coach him through every breath. _Nope. Not going to happen._

Char shoved those familiar searching hands away and vigorously shook the damned Albuterol inhaler himself, twisting on the proffered spacer and shoving it into his mouth, over his tongue. He tilted his head back and breathed in as deeply as he could, holding in for ten seconds of agony before breathing out and coughing through the ache in his chest once more. But he took two more hits and managed to feel human enough after that.

Merely woozy and wheezy as he rested his head on the balcony railing. Just trying to breathe.

He saw the flash of an Epi-Pen in his brother’s hands and shook his head. It wasn’t a full on attack. He was fucking _fine_. Just constantly _stressed and tired._

Hen had no right to look at him like _that_ goddammit.

“Are you sure you’re alright?” Those eyes so round with concern _(Speaking of, what the fuck? When had his little brother taken up boxing? There was a gnarly shiner that had his right eye nearly swollen shut. If Char had been able to breathe properly, he probably would have investigated further, but as it stood, he was still barely taking in those raggedy breaths)._ Charlie felt rage blossom in the pit of his belly and rolled his eyes pointedly.

“Yes, of course I’m fine, _Mother Hen.”_

His voice sounded painfully weak and thready, even to his own ears.

Then it was Henri’s turn to roll his eyes, well the one functional eye he still had.

He really fucking hated his brother’s asthma. 

Well, Brittle Asthma to be exact, Type 2.

The thing that had terrorized Charlie's life for the last three years. 

Henri had always just assumed that having asthma meant a couple of puffs on a rescue inhaler and then being good to go. ...Okay, so maybe a couple more doctors' appointments a year, maybe even some scary hospital visits too, but nothing like Char’s asthma.

He wasn't expecting a shitty overbearing big brother who was completely normal, completely symptom-free and healthy one minute, maybe with a couple more daily medications than any other guy and some wheezy periods in bad weather or allergy season, but nothing major; to cyanotic and lying on the floor unable to breathe the next. It was always so fast and so forceful that most of the time rescue inhalers wouldn't even work in the event of an acute attack. At least not at first. Char had to use an Epi-Pen instead, the quick-acting shot of epinephrine was usually enough for a short burst of life, bringing his brother back to consciousness just long enough for someone to shove a plastic mouthpiece between those chapped lips and force him to breathe. 

Breathing was nonnegotiable. 

No matter how many times Charlie’s body seemed to think it was the _lesser_ of the two options. 

Henri had already spent many days and nights holding onto his brother’s hand in the back of a racing ambulance, Charlie, who was supposed to be infallible, lying limp against his chest, hooked up to supplemental oxygen with a nebulizer pressed between his lips. Fighting his way back to the land of the living. 

But by the end of the day, that same guy who'd been inches away from a ventilator, would be sitting upright in the ER, nursing on a cherry ring-pop he'd suckered Henri into buying from a nearby vending machine and bitching about getting pizza on the way home. A shit-eating grin in its place of crowing glory, twitching to life on those pink oxygenated lips. 

That was the thing about Charlie’s type of asthma, it was rare and it was fast. Attacks came and went like a whirlwind with proper treatment. Without it? Char would be dead in under three hours, if he was lucky enough to get that long. 

And the Dads, Tits and B didn’t exactly _know_ about the whole thing. _(Charlie’s dumb request, not Henri’s. And their brothers usually had their heads so far up their asses, that they didn’t even notice a difference)._

Henri had been there during the first attack and he was there now.

As his brother tried to weakly glare him into submission. Charlie’s breathing wasn’t getting any better. “You’re not alright.” _Orange to the thigh, blue to the sky._ He plunged the Epi-Pen’s needle through his brother’s pajama pants and rubbed at the spot in little circles afterwards.

“Then what are you _asking me for?!”_

Charlie rasped, angry and opinionated as usual, even when in pain.

While Henri sighed, dragging his big brother to yet another nearby Urgent Care.

Yes, he was the responsible one. The fun one. The carefree one. The only one with inborn common-sense, thank you very much. But at the Urgent Care’s front desk, his trembling hand did linger over a few of the glossy brochures.

_Are You A Victim Of Domestic Violence?_

_Stop the Silence: End Domestic Violence._

_Hello I’m: Being Abused._  
_Domestic Violence: It’s never this obvious._

His older brother was in the exam room, being poked and prodded and bitching like usual, and nobody else was there to see, as Henri bit his bottom lip and shoved several into his bag.

  
-X-

  
_“It's not the cowboys that are missing anymore_  
_That problem was already old in '94_  
_Don't be offended, this might seem a little wrong_

_Where have all the gay guys gone?”_

  
_-_ X-

 


	10. Or should I lie with death, my bride?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: Thank you for sticking with me guys! This chap is not my fav, but I felt you deserved something for waiting so long :) 
> 
> (I promise I'll fix it up a little. :)).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Waltz of The Flowers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DiL3p98ejE
> 
> Kitri's Variation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOvXo841L1o
> 
> Couple bits of Traditonal Chinese Dance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AiD_say5xk
> 
> Song Quotes are Song to the Siren by This Mortal Coil and Chiquitita by ABBA. 
> 
> Loa Baron La Croix info: http://voodoo.101projects101days.com/loa/baron-la-croix/
> 
> A BIG THANKS TO SO MANY OF MY TUMBLR BUDDIES! @UniversesVisiting  
> @agnosticofgod and @makesteverogersproud along with everyone else bbs I love you!!
> 
> (ALSO! If I have not responded to your comment, I'm coming for you! I promise! :))

_“Long afloat on shipless oceans_  
_I did all my best to smile_  
_'Til your singing eyes and fingers_  
_Drew me loving to your isle…”_

 

 

Beau ran off the stage at his first ballet recital.

He was six years old, all bouncy blonde ringlets and corpulent pink tutu that floated up around him like a rosebud’s newborn petals, damp and wrinkled with new life, following his movements a hair’s breadth behind.

They were doing a child-appropriate rendition of George Balanchine’s _Waltz of the Flowers._

He’d loved it, being the center of attention once more. He was a performer in every life and proudly twirled around stage with the rest of his bunch of first-graders, around and around like lovely peonies in bloom. Arms raised and skirts fluffed up as they dropped into wobbly pliés. He remembered smiling so widely and with so many teeth, that he’d thought his face was going to crack like a geode. _(He liked those, they were so shiny inside and prettier than any boring old diamond. Daddy let him crack one at the museum on his birthday)._

The little boy had even closed his eyes to breathe it all in and let his muscle memory take care of the movements. Reveling in the beauty of performance once more, of captivating an audience.

Until that is, he heard a painfully small sob and the sound of a little bum hitting the stage floor.

His eyes shot open just in time to see one of his classmates sitting on the floor and crying, she’d fallen down and her little hands were wrapped tightly around her white tight-covered ankle. He hadn’t even thought twice before kneeling down beside her and picking her up so that she didn’t get trampled. It was a bit awkward, since he was quite smaller than her, but he managed to get her off the stage and into the waiting hands of a capable adult.

An adult who then tried to usher him back onto the stage.

She was still crying in the stage-hand’s arms, so he shook his head. “I don’t want to dance, I want to stay with Deanie.”

Wrapping his speckled little hand around hers.

She had looked at him with such relief in those big green eyes.

She would look at him in much of the same way several years later, when she _(as class president)_ set the Prom Queen’s sparkly crown atop his curls and pressed the gaudy scepter into his hands.

When his Dads’ asked later about why he hadn’t left her side, he’d just smiled, staring out the window of the car packed with he and his brothers, counting the rain droplets that speckled its surface and the way they would morph into several gigantic blobs once the car started moving again, perfectly miscible, perfectly indistinguishable from the previous separate entities they were.

_“Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds.”_

_Humata, Hukhta, Huvarshta._

His father had taught him that once.

  
-X-

  
_“And you sang_  
_Sail to me_  
_Sail to me_  
_Let me enfold you…”_

  
-X-

  
He came back to consciousness in pieces.

His fingers pressed into something soft, supple and warm. He flexed them a few times unconsciously, before he pressed them in deeper, satisfied with the give he discovered. He made a tiny pleased noise in the back of his throat as his feet came back to him then, with a tingling that spread from his toes all the way to his knees. The sheets were fresh and cold as they rubbed over and soothed his raw skin. It felt like all his nerve endings had been whittled down to a point and poised, ready to thrust in battle like spears. His entire body was at war.

_He thought back to Dr. Atkinson’s office._

_To that innocuous manila folder that held his test results within._

_His signed death warrant._

_At war with the virus._

_A battle he was losing._

His arms tightened around the middle of the soft being that he was holding, the action so far out of his control that it was in orbit. Warm breaths blew gently into his hair by the man who held him close. He was being cradled of all things. Tended to, as if he was something delicate, something revered, something precious. In actuality he was anything but… _the epitome of a cosmic joke._

His torso came back with the loving swipe of a large hand that ran up and down his spine, aching to soothe him.

The hand was calloused, rough, he felt the way that the skin caught and tore on the soft cottony fabric of his shirt, the shirt that was well-washed, well-worn and many sizes too big. Tiny hitches, up and down. He wriggled around, snuggling closer to his best source of warmth.

“Freddie?”

Oh.

_Oh!_

Finally.

Deaky had finally come to see him, he’d waited so long…

He was so worried Deaky wasn’t going to come, that he wouldn’t be there when…

“You,” His voice sounded like it had been dragged up from the very recesses of the earth. “…came.” He warbled, weakly. His grand majestic voice was far from what it used to be. Lesions swallowing up his vocal cords, the same way they ate away at his bones. He ached to apologize. His voice had so often been Deaky’s as well and now he’d gone and ruined it. Those hands, Deaky’s hands, cradled his face and pressed him closer.

“Let me grab you some water, love.” Deaky shifted, but the frontman tightened his grip, wishing he had enough strength to open his eyes. Shaking his head, he was surprised when he didn’t hear the scratch of his stubbly dark beard against the sheets. He’d grown it to cover up all the disgusting new sores on his face, but now it was just a brand of his illness, his loss of vanity along with his looks.

He used to be _beautiful._

“I waited, Deaky…” He gasped, his voice hardly above a whisper, he could feel himself starting to slip away again. “So long.” Those broad arms cuddled him closer, hot kisses pressing over and over into his hair. It was too long, that was odd. But his brain was too sleepy to process his observations properly.

“Freddie?”

When had little Deaky gotten so much _bigger_ than him? Not just around the middle, not just in the way his arms could hold him now, not just in the way those hands felt like a vast island in a raging tempest. But in his _soul_. His Deaky was not just that boy with a gap-toothed smile and feathers of milk-cow brown hair anymore. His Deaky was so much _grander_ now, so much larger than himself.

He didn’t care.

_(He felt so small)._

“You _came.”_

He whispered with a loose, dopey smile, before his stupor dragged him under once more.

John Richard Deacon, well into his sixties, wept as though still a child as he cradled his nineteen-year-old best-friend of more than two decades. Reminded once more that he wasn’t there until Freddie’s funeral, that he never actually said goodbye.

That he never came.

  
-X-

  
“ _Here I am_  
_Here I am_  
_Waiting to hold you…”_

  
-X-

  
Beau was nine years old, standing up on a rickety stool in his Grandmére’s kitchen _(as he was forever tiny and unable to reach anything properly, much to his growing annoyance. Their family GP said it was because of his less-than-stellar birthplace and those early months spent in a tiny Siberian orphanage, where he was lucky if he was fed formula once a day and changed regularly_ ), trying to gather all the supplies that she’d requested.

The old woman with her adder tongue a-lashing had burst into their house in the wee hours of the morning, and all but ordered a pair of tiny hands to help her in the kitchen to prepare for Mardi Gras. Instantly Beau had been quickly shuffled over by an apologetic Papa, he having been kitchen-helper for many years of his own childhood, and she’d hastily switched what hand held her knobby cane. So that she could snatch up his little hand in her own old wax-papery one.

“Come along now, chile.”

He’d blown a couple of errant blonde curls out of his face as he nodded, obediently. “Yes, Grandmére.”

His grandmother had promptly licked her palm and swept it across his forehead, slicking down his hair. Annoyed by his fidgeting most likely. He’d shivered with disgust at the wetness of it, but didn’t dare show it, lest he catch that wooden cane across the backs of his calves for insolence alone.

They were making enough Mardi Gras King Cake for what seemed like the whole French Quarter in one go, as his Grandmére wasn’t just his or his family’s Mama Delia, she was everybody’s _(the same everybody who would crown him the first Prince(ss) of Mardi Gras in cream-colored chiffon, the next day and for many years afterward)._

He had then grimaced, as she but flounced up behind him and shoved a mixing bowl and wet ingredients for a buttery glaze into his hands. “I’m really bad in the kitchen, Grandmére.” He remembered whispering softly, ashamed, with cheeks the color of spotted apple blossoms in spring. As if she was unaware of his deficiencies and hadn’t known him for most of his short second life already.

“Who went and told you a fool thing like that?” As she started to mix her custard, whipping clouds out of the lemon and cream cheese by her own deceptively frail hands. No recipe and no mixer, that was how she taught him how to cook. A dash of cinnamon there, a sprinkle of paprika here…

She taught him the root of all cooking as a little boy. _The Cajun Holy Trinity: bell peppers, onion and celery, (add it and you can save even the worst mistake)._

How to whip up a perfect roux, a mix of flour and fat, the root of most proper Creole dishes, _(you can’t stop stirring ever, if you stop it will burn. A light roux is a compliment, not overpowering. While a dark roux will stand up to even a smoked duck gumbo in power)._

Then the third and most important:

_‘Mon bebé, always make do with what you've got.’_

In life and in the kitchen.

He’d hopped down from the stool while trying to balance everything in his tiny bayou-reed arms, dappled from days in the sun spent playing with his brothers. “When I lived before, I wasn’t very good.” Using his lips to cover up his baby teeth on reflex, forgetting that there was nothing prominent left to hide anymore.

Yet there was no delicacy around his Grandmére, she was always as blunt as they come, hands on her hips. “Well, that was before wasn’t it? That isn’t you now.” As if it were the simplest advice in the universe.

“But I remember being bad.” He stressed, blue eyes watering and he pretended on reflex, even then, that it was from all the spices floating about in the air.

“So? Everybody has the power to change _, mon chou_. Different questions, different choices, different paths… You have a hundred new decisions to make, little one. Don’t let your first life make them for you.”

There was something in her eyes when she looked at him, something like the looks she gave a few of the local expectant mothers, when they came to her for simple hoodoo and gris-gris.

_‘What’s wrong, Grandmére?’_

_She would give him that look again, her eyes tracing the poor soul’s path out the door._

_‘The Baron’s coming for her child, he isn’t long for this world.’ She would struggle back inside with a sigh. ‘Some things just ain’t meant to live. They ain’t bad enough for this world of ours.’_

She paused, regaling her grandson in quiet thoughtfulness.

“And don’t you ever let anyone tell you that you gotta pick one either.” His grandmother caught his face in her aged hands. “Both your lives are equally important, both of them make up who you are. You are perfect, _mon bebé._ Even if you ain’t got the common sense I gave your Daddy in the cradle.”

He giggled, flashing a toothy smile. “Well, you didn’t give Papa much.”

_‘Don’t we have a loa, Grandmére?’ He had asked her once, as she took him to one of her spiritual meetings across town, balancing a crate of rum and spices between them._

_‘Yes, bebé. Baron La Croix, one of the loa of the dead.’_

  
-X-

  
“ _Did I dream you dreamed about me?_  
_Were you here when I was forced out_  
_Now my foolish boat is leaning_  
_Broken lovelorn on your rocks.”_

  
-X-

  
Beau woke up happy.

He woke up with a vision of himself as a child printed across the backs of his eyelids. A little boy on Mardi Gras Court with a tilted little gaudy crown on his head and a sash draped securely across his chest. His mouth was full of creamy King Cake and his lips curled up in the corners like a cat. He was warm and loved, cocooned by the memory of his somewhat-pleasant childhood. Then his pacific blue eyes opened up once more and he remembered.

He remembered _everything._

 _Miami. Phoebe. The panic attack. Brian. Roger. Everyone freaking out around him. The escalation. The fear. The most painful memories of his last life, his death._ The usual vicious cycle of phantom pain and ghostly wounds opening up on his skin. He had to force himself to take in a shuddering breath now. To force his rebellious lungs to do their bloody job, cajoling them, reassuring them that there was nothing wrong with them in this life. The last thing he wanted was a repeat performance, another one of his dramatic episodes.

He felt sick.

The warmth, love and happiness leeching out of him, with every new horrible scenario that he was sure must have been going on in front of him while he was practically catatonic on the floor.

_Oh Phoebe, dearest heart._

_I can’t ruin your life again. I just can’t._

_Miami…_

_Why did you stay? After everything I did, after all the foolish things I said… why did you stay?_

_I don’t deserve your kindness, your forgiveness, your absolution_.

Every part of him was screaming for him to get up, to move.

He had been a runner once.

He was a runner still.

Unfortunately, the moment his socked feet hit the soft trailer carpeting, his body decided that it wasn't a big fan of sleeping a dozen hours on an empty stomach after a panic attack of that magnitude and the only place he ended up was face down on the floor, retching while propped up on his elbows, to spare himself a face full of vomit.

He wasn’t going to cry, not again, he _refused._

It didn’t matter if he was hurting all over, or if he was desperate for that release, or the retching of bile made his eyes burn. He was stubborn as fuck in both his incarnations _and he would not be crying again, darling._

Instead he starting humming a stilted version of _Kitri’s Variation_ from _Don Quixote Act l_ , one of his favorite pieces to have danced in competition. It partially won him his scholarship to the Royal Ballet as a boy.

It was red, fiery and amazingly fast.

So much of Kitri was hints of character dance, something he was well-versed in, _(having explored the intricacies of Chinese traditional dance for a few summers past)_ , the arms had to be held with Spanish flair.

As well as the bloody fucking fan that he promptly jabbed into his eye by accident more than once. Kitri wasn't meant to be sexy or flirtatious, she already had her lover that she wanted to marry against her father’s wishes. She was meant to be a joyous happy spirit, wild and bright and young and free. All the things he pointedly wasn’t at that age.

So he had always unconsciously danced her with a touch of guilt and sorrow.

He didn’t hear the door open or footfalls anywhere in his muddied misery, but suddenly there were arms around his waist, gently pulling him to his feet in a way that was reminiscent of long hard nights in the early 70s.

_‘Come on Fred, let’s get you in the cab, yeah?’ Brian’s ever-soothing voice, thick and slow as if composed of molasses, was music to his ears._

A lifetime later and it still felt the same.

“Come on Fred, let’s get you on the bed, yeah?”

The boy nodded sluggishly, blinking his eyes to clear them of the murk that seemed to have settled over them, a veritable thick curtain of smog, The Great Fog of London.

“Dizzy.” He finally sighed and shit… His voice sounded as if there was a cheese grater shoved down there, or worse, a bit like that time he’d tried scarfing. Not his wisest choice.

“Because you need something to eat, numpty. But this will have to do.” _Rog? Roger was there too?_

His eyes had closed without him realizing it and he opened them instead of his mouth, when he felt a straw press against his lips. The once-blonde bloke was sitting in front of him looking far worse than Beau had probably ever felt. His clothes were rumpled and his face was pale and drawn, the smudges under his eyes screamed that he hadn’t slept in about hundred years or so and his hands were shaking, far worse than Beau’s own.

When his soft blue eyes darted to Brian sitting next to them, his heart ached even worse. The guitarist looked just as rough, his curls frizzy and undefined, eyes shadowed and not wearing a shirt to cover up that silver-haired chest, just a pair of wrinkled pajama trousers. Bri seemed to follow his line of sight and shifted his arms to cover up his middle, a scarlet flush playing around his cheekbones.

Insecure and embarrassed… around _Beau?_

_Why?_

“Drink it, Fred.”

Rog insisted, pressing the straw against his lips with more ferocity until the danseur finally, loathly, opened up. Sucking down a few quick dregs of orange juice that burned like fire all the way down, before pulling away, the world suddenly feeling far more clear.

“Your turn, dear.” He caught Roger’s face in one of his hands and swept his thumb over the stubbly cheek that had once been peach skin soft. “You look far worse than I feel, Roggie.”

“That’s debatable.”

The former frontman rolled his eyes as he pressed himself closer, resting his head in the little alcove between Rog’s shoulder and neck, so he could feel his best-friend and once-lover _breathe_. He appreciated the little reminder. Apparently so did Brian, who leaned over to rest his head on Beau’s shoulder. Just like he used to when they were young and nothing really mattered.

“You know what I mean, wanker.” Roger only grunted in reply, and Beau felt his headrest bounce. “You haven’t taken care of yourself properly.”

“Pot and kettle, Freddie.” Roger all but growled. As the drummer’s warm calloused hand started to sweep up and down Beau’s knobby spine, he could have purred from the droopy soothing feeling that poured through his taut limbs. “You lied to us. _Again._ ”

“About what, darling?” Playing as coy as ever. He wouldn’t pull away to meet Roger’s eyes or even Brian’s, whose hand was now rubbing deep tissue circles into his thigh.

“That you remember—“ Roger started, tone as brusque as ever, that tone attempting to belay just how wrecked he looked, and the way he couldn’t seem to let go of the boy in his arms.

But Beau stopped him before it got too far, with a finger on his chapped lips and a sad shake of his head. He wouldn’t allow Roger to say it, not when it looked like the words were liable to kill him where he sat. He and Maggie May both.

_His poor darlings._

“Shush, love. Don’t be daft, I have that all under control, silly. Don’t worry your pretty little heads about it.”

Brian pulled away, recoiling with shock and something like grief or pity hidden in the contours of his face. “That was the worst panic attack I’ve ever _seen,_ Fred. _That’s_ having it under _control?”_ He sounded incredulous and looked horrified to top it all off. “You bloody near stopped _breathing!”_

Roger was still sputtering in complete and utter indignant shock, as if Beau had grown a second head right in front of him, or slapped him seven ways from Sunday.

Beau shrugged, as a pair of large warm hands started to card through his mussed curls, the smell of piney woods and roe. He knew those hands so well that he pressed a kiss to the knuckles when they neared his treacherous mouth.

Remembered that cold and desolate hospital room eons ago, where he pressed tender kisses to both of those blessed hands, one healthy and pale, the other swollen and red-tinged, praying to whatever God that promised him the continued health of his lover.

Whatever God promised him one more day with his precious Brimi May, his faeryland lover, born too good for this world.

_“I’m sorry.”_

It was years upon years too late and it didn’t come with tears, with pain, with passion. It came from his juice-slick lips, as empty and soulless as though he’d been flippantly conversing about the weather outside or the quantity of hummingbird feeders in London.

Spoke those words and the next, like they were meaningless.

“I told you I never forgot.”

_I came back broken._

_I wasn't meant to remember, but I do._

_I didn’t tell you for a reason, surely I’ve ruined your lives enough._

_I wanted to spare you something_.

Unfortunately the shrug and empty apology did little to defuse the pain of the situation, it did quite the opposite in fact.

“Oh don’t cry, dears! You’ll get horribly _blotchy_ …” _Yes, because that's what they were worried about, you vain twat._

A pair of mirthless husky laughs assaulted his ears, before they surged closer and he was held tightly between them.

Clutched by frantic searching hands on both sides, he was the solid piece, anchoring down two of the first loves of his first life and what was hastily becoming his second.

  
-X-

  
_“For you sing, ‘Touch me not, touch me not, come back tomorrow_  
_Oh my heart, Oh my heart shies from the sorrow…’”_

  
-X-

  
Adam Lambert had a _problem._

His life had always been pretty straightforward, _(a poor choice of words given that he’d discovered and acted upon his orientation since he was twelve years old, but eh)_. His relationships, the serious ones, had been few and far in-between. Lots of flings, lots of loneliness and a string of bereft hearts left both behind him and occasionally inside him.

But he’d always assumed, like most people, that he would eventually meet _someone_ to shake up his world and bring him back down to earth.

He just didn’t factor in the tiny blonde ballet dancer that Queen unceremoniously dragged into his life, kicking and screaming.

Freddie Mercury had always been one of his greatest inspirations as a young queer boy a) trying to succeed in the music industry and b) near-suffocating from the urge to belong somewhere. But the legendary frontman had always been something unearthly, someone hard to relate to, a veritable  _god_ so removed from his own life.

But while _Freddie Mercury_ was a deified idol, _Beau LaCroix_ was a human youth with a heart of gold and the most tarty fashion sense Adam had ever seen.

The little blonde was Freddie, but he was also Beau and sometimes, painfully, it was plain to see that he felt like neither one.

This Freddie was a fallible, flawed human being, and it was soon easy to see why Brian had always said that everyone was _a little in love_ with their old frontman. It was hard not to fall for the dork who spent half his time in Adam’s apartment, winning over his dog Pharaoh and sporting his avocado face mask and his lovingly painted toenails as a bonus. That _come-hither_ smile and his messy curls.

The lovely queen who dug up an old DVD copy of _Mamma Mia_ for one of Adam’s bad days and set everything up for them to have a cuddle session on the couch.

The blonde who had unearthed the most soft and cuddly blankets that he could find, bought Adam’s favorite junk food and oversized onesie pajamas, iced coffee from Starbucks, moist towelettes and built a little nest of comfort on the couch for them. Even Pharaoh lay half-flopped into Freddie’s side, tummy up in the air and tongue lolling free.

When Adam finally dragged himself out of his funky room, he was overjoyed to be able to fall right into the outstretched arms of his little blonde.

All it took was a: _“Oh, do come here, darling… You look like you need a proper cuddle.”_ Before Adam was snuggled into him and tearing up like putty in Freddie’s hands.

Pharaoh licked at his Daddy’s shaking hand a few times with a few pointed looks at Freddie as if to say. _“Can you fix him please? I brought him to you and everything, but he’s still leaking.”_

Tears going everywhere.

He tried to apologize through the drippy and snotty mess that he’d become, but all he got was a little kiss on the forehead, the most tender hushes and a rousing rendition of _Chiquitita._

 _“Chiquitita, tell me the truth_  
_I'm a shoulder you can cry on_  
_Your best friend, I'm the one you must rely on_  
_You were always sure of yourself_

 _Now I see you've broken a feather_  
_I hope we can patch it up together…_ ”

“It’s okay to not be okay sometimes, my dearest _Madam_. It just means you’re human. A _beautiful, radiant, perfectly imperfect human.”_ Freddie had held him closer with every word, letting the young man fall asleep on his shoulder with his congested snores and all.

_“Try once more like you did before. Sing a new song, Chiquitita…”_

Now when Adam tried to think of that childhood dream, that perfect partner who would ride in on his white horse and sweep him up into a mad and fiery, passionate romance… all he saw was a sweet ballet boy who was also a legendary frontman, with corkscrew blonde curls that loved to halo about his head as he slept and an outstretched hand.

“Not just _a little_ , Bri.”

Adam finally admitted to himself in the still silence of his dark bedroom, checking to see if his little blonde had called him back yet, as it wasn't like him to miss their daily goodnight FaceTime without texting first. Pharaoh raised his heavy head with sad eyes, pouting _(if it was even possible for dogs to do that)._

_Yeah, I know. I miss him too._

“It’s not _just a little_ anything anymore.”

  
-X-

  
_“Well I'm as puzzled as the newborn child_  
_I'm as riddled as the tide_  
_Should I stand amid the breakers?_

_Or should I lie with death, my bride?”_

  
-X-

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [But My Love This Cannot Be](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17302772) by [UniversesVisiting](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniversesVisiting/pseuds/UniversesVisiting)




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